Five Reading Strategies for Early Readers

Your student or child is stumbling over words. He or she is finding work too difficult and you are afraid that he or she will be retained in the same grade for non performance.

Strategy one:

When your child stops or makes up a word, say, ?Get your mouth ready for the sound of that word.? Do not say, ?Sound it out!? That takes away the integration of three important brain functions when reading: meaning, visual and structure.

Strategy two:

Your child says the first letter of the word. Then, you say, ?Think of what makes sense.? This enables your child to think of context around the word and often will self correct.

Strategy three:

Give ?wait? time. Do not tell your child the word unless it is a person?s name or the name of a City, State, or another word that you know is beyond them or not necessary for fluent reading. Giving wait time helps the child check to see what the word could be.

Say, ?Does that look right? Does that make sense? Often the child will check the word, think about it and fix it himself.

Strategy four:

If your student or child reads a paragraph and make over 5 errors, the material is too hard. Make cards with high frequency words, which link verbs and nouns and keep the meaning clear. Words like, to, as, the, what, where, when, how, why, here, now. Ask their teacher for a list of high frequency words appropriate to grade level.

Take out the cards and help him or her recognize the words.

Do this with older children with their spelling words. They like to play games with the word cards, so be creative and mix them up and ask them to find the word within seconds and they get a point. This is a fun activity. Another fun activity for older students is to write a sentence on a sentence strip ( a long 2 inch strip of paper you may cut) and cut the words into syllables. Keep the high frequency words in tact. They can learn prefixes, suffixes and roots of the words this way. This can be an individual or group activity.

Strategy five:

Young children need to learn to move their eyes from left to right. For fluency, take a piece of paper and cut it into a pencil shape and have them put the point of the paper in front of the first letter that is confusing. Push them through the word. Start from the beginning of the sentence so they may get the context clues from the rest of the sentence. If it is an early reader, there is a picture where you can direct your child. Say, ?Look at the picture. What do you see happening?? Have the child tell you, and if they have no idea, tell them what is happening in the picture. Then they can read the story again. Say, ?Try that again??

Have fun reading age and level appropriate books to them, and with them.

Most ?childrens? books are really for the parents to read to them. Look for reading levels and books suggested by their teachers or Librarians to give your child quiet reading time at home. This is how he or she will become a successful reader and love to learn.

Mary D. Bogin is a 30 year veteran teacher. Integrating art, reading, and writing is her method of teaching literacy. Visit http://www.anyonecanread.wordpress.com for more great methods on teaching reading to children and adults.

Source: http://toddsblogs.com/referenceandeducation/2012/08/08/five-reading-strategies-for-early-readers/

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