March is National Reading Month *and* the Stewart SLP Read-A-Thon! Join our Read-A-Thon to set a solid reading routine for your children, share a love of stories, earn prizes, and raise money for families who need financial support for speech-language therapy. Get your Read-A-Thon packet here.
We all know that encouraging our children to read is important. We want them to do well in school (where reading is a must). We know that reading helps with critical thinking. And we might even hope for them to enjoy discovering new ideas and adventures in stories. But how can parents support our children’s literacy at home? There are important and different reading strategies parents can incorporate at each level of development.
Early Exposure
Beginning at birth, children benefit from being exposed to lots of words used in lots of different ways. Parents and caregivers talk to infants and toddlers, which is how most of our functional everyday language develops. But books offer rich, new vocabulary through different experiences. The repetition of re-reading favorite stories provides a scaffold for young children’s development. Some important home reading strategies for this stage include:
Get a library card! Books can be quite expensive, and libraries offer free access to a seemingly endless supply of stories. They also often offer children’s programming and trained librarians to guide you with book selections.
Make reading a part of your daily routine, even with infants. Perhaps sit together with a book (or 10!) before naps and bedtime, or make reading a fun wake-up activity. Regular exposure sets the stage for a solid reading foundation.
Look for different types of fiction and nonfiction books written by varied authors of all cultural backgrounds, which will provide a rich, diverse sea of language (and be prepared to read those books over and over again!).
Reading isn’t JUST about speaking the words on the page. Make reading with your children a shared experience by using sound-effects, varied volume/rate/pitch, and comments. Point out parts of the illustrations or plot that you find interesting. Ask questions about what happened on a page and wonder about what might happen next to build language comprehension. At the end of the book, give a short summary or impression (e.g., “Wow, that was a fun book about zoo animals! I loved the giraffes”). Your models will encourage your children to think and talk about what’s happening in the stories.
Literacy Development
As children enter preschool and kindergarten, they begin a more formal reading education. Parents can help by incorporating more explicit reading strategies at home.
Basic reading foundations include the structure of a book (cover, pages, page numbers) and the left-to-right / top-to-bottom orientation for English reading. Talk about the cover, where to find page numbers, and use your finger to track the words on the page to show the proper orientation.
Play with rhymes! Rhyming is an important phonological awareness task that supports early literacy. Find books with rhymes and make up your own rhymes in everyday activities.
Spend time building letter recognition and letter-sound awareness. Magnetic letters and letter blocks/puzzles are fun ways to teach letters. Take one letter at a time, and look for that “letter of the week” in books that you read. Start to model sounding out simple words.
Continue to have conversations about the stories you read together, including plot elements, why/how things happened, character feelings, and predictions to further expand language skills. Make connections between your life and the events of the book. Decide with your child if the book was good, bad, silly, sad, etc. and WHY. You might disagree or learn something new from your children (and that’s OK!).
Give your child a chance to read to you AND make time for reading to your child.
On The Reading Train
Once children are proficient readers, shared reading continues to be an important family activity.
Reading together offers opportunities for focused conversation about favorite (or least favorite) story events, reflection on morals/lessons from the story, and social bonding.
Taking turns with who chooses the book (and reads aloud) provides insight into each other’s interests and personalities.
Many books have been adapted to film; it can be a rich experience to watch the show and discuss similarities and differences between the book and movie as a higher-level language activity.
But What If Reading Is Hard?
Reading does not come naturally to all children. It might be difficult to learn decoding, reading comprehension, or both. When reading is a struggle, children can get support in multiple ways:
Explicit instruction/support from teachers and/or reading specialists.
Therapy with speech-language pathologists (SLPs). SLPs are trained in teaching the phonological processing and awareness that provides a foundation for literacy development. SLPs are also experts at language development, including reading comprehension.
Parents should follow recommendations for home practice from schools and SLPs.
Importantly, parents should also work hard to keep reading fun for their children. Encourage your children to find printed books they want read aloud to them. Introduce them to pod-casts and audio books. Cuddle up together and share a good book.
For more information about literacy development or how SLPs can help, contact us at nicole@stewartslp.com.