Helping Your Child Learn to Read at Home

Reading with young children creates wonderful memories and encourages the development of foundational literacy and language skills. Parents can share their own love for reading by talking about the books they enjoy and encouraging their kids to read alongside them. Modeling reading regularly, whether it’s a book, magazine, or newspaper is highly effective. A parent can also encourage interactive reading experiences, like asking questions, making predictions, or acting out stories. Even setting up a cozy reading nook in the home is a great way to motivate children!

JES reading specialists get into more of the nitty-gritty of reading. We explicitly teach phonemic awareness which is t he ability to recognize and work with the individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. We also teach the alphabetic principle, a critical skill that involves connecting letters with their sounds. We then teach kids to decode and encode words. And we practice over and over so that kids can become accurate and fluent readers.

Recent research has shown that teaching children how to read correctly is based on a collection of scientifically researched practices. Therefore, there are some do’s and don’ts when helping your child read at home.

If your child gets stuck on a word, please do the following:

-tell your child to look at all the letters
-tell your child to sound out the word by saying the sounds from left to right
-then tell your child to blend those sounds together to read the word
-if it is a longer word, have your child break the word into parts or syllables, and then read each syllable

These things are not helpful when a child is stuck on a word:

-telling your child to guess
-telling your child to look at the picture to figure out the word
-telling your child to look at the first letter and then guess the rest
-telling your child to skip over the word

These statements are outdated practices that do not improve reading skills.

Thank you for helping your child! Remember, be patient with beginner readers, sometimes it takes a lot of practice and consistency before your child can read independently!