Reading at Home

Reading to Your Child

A great way to support your child in their reading development is to read to your child. The kinds of words and the way language is used when we talk is often different from the words and language used in books. Every time you read to your child you expose them to new words and word meanings, new genres and kinds of books, and different ways written language can be used. Through listening to you read, your child also grows their imagination and builds knowledge about the topics of the books you read together. All of these exposures and experiences turn into background knowledge. Students in school make connections between new learning and their background knowledge and they use this knowledge to make inferences and predictions about the new texts they are reading. It is estimated that children who hear one read aloud book per day are exposed to approximately 78,000 words each year.

Storyline Online is a website with videos of many famous people reading picture books aloud. This may be a site your child will enjoy visiting with you.  

The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk has a few short videos for parents with great ideas for how to make reading aloud to your child a meaningful and interactive experience. Here they are:

Having Your Child Read to You

Another great way to support your child’s reading development is by letting them read to you or with you.  Just like learning to ride a bike takes practice, learning to read takes practice too. Each time your child reads it helps them become a better reader, even if it is the twentieth time they are reading the same book! 

In our primary grades, when students are learning how to use their phonics knowledge to decode words when reading, we frequently use decodable readers.  When students are proficient with using phonics knowledge to read we use more standard grade-level texts or leveled readers.  Both decodable readers and leveled readers are described below.

Decodable Readers

Decodable Readers are texts written using words that have specific phonetic sound/spellings in them and a few sight words. Their purpose is to be a text that students can read using the phonetic code knowledge they have learned without having to rely on the illustrations or predictable language patterns to figure out the words. Decodable readers are especially helpful to our primary grade readers who are developing their decoding skills because they allow the students to practice and apply the code knowledge (phonics knowledge) they are learning to reading texts. As the students learn more code knowledge, the words in the decodable reader expand and become more varied. Once students have become proficient with using the phonetic code that spells the 44 sounds in English to read, they no longer need to read decodable texts.

Publishers typically write decodable readers to match the order in which the phonetic sound/spelling patterns and sight words are taught in their program so students can practice reading texts with words they can mostly decode. It is common for reading programs to start by teaching the most common spellings for consonant and short vowel sounds before teaching digraphs, silent e spellings, and other vowel combinations. However, no two programs teach phonetic sound/spelling patterns and sight words in the exact same order. So, when reading a decodable reader with your child that is not from the core reading program used in LPS you may need to assist your child with some of the words in the text.

If your child gets stuck on a word when reading a decodable reader with you, try to:

  1. Have your child look closely at the word and run their fingers under each letter as they make the sounds and blend them together to decode the word.
  2. Once sounded out, fix the pronunciation so it sounds right if needed.

***If the word looks like a word your child can’t decode either sound out the word together or just tell your child the word and keep reading.

Here are some sites that offer free access to decodable readers:

Reading With Students in the Intermediate Grades Readers

Authentic texts and books from the library are great choices for students who are strong decoders and have gained proficiency with the spellings for the 44 sounds in English. For most students this happens sometime towards the end of second grade.  These kinds of books are not controlled for decodability or phonetic code knowledge.  One measure that can be used to help select books at the appropriate level of difficulty for your child is to look at the Lexile Level of the text. A Lexile level is a number that represents the readability of the text. It takes into account things like the length of sentences and the number of unique words in the text. Lexiles ranges don’t consider the topic or the complexity of writing in the text so there may be texts in your child’s Lexile range that are easy to read but hard to make sense of. This chart from Lexile.com could be helpful when looking for books for your child to read. This chart shows the Lexile number of typical texts read by students who are in the 50th -90th percentile for their grade level on norm-referenced assessments such as MAP Growth in the fall and in the spring of each grade level.

If your child gets stuck on a word when reading with you, try to:

  1. Have the child look “inside” the word to see if they can decode the word syllable by syllable. For additional support consider asking them if they see any prefixes or suffixes they know. Then ask them what sound the vowel makes in the parts that are not a prefix or suffix.
  2. Have your child reread the sentence to see if the word they sounded out makes sense. If needed, adjust the pronunciation to make it sound correct.
  3. If your child can’t decode the word alone it is okay for you to help and decode it together or just tell your child the word so they can continue to read.

Here are Different Ways to Read With Your Child to Keep it Fun:

  • Choral Reading – You and your child read the words at the same time.
  • Cloze Reading – You read. As you read, leave words out (nouns, verbs). Have your child fill in the missing words.
  • Cloze Reading, version 2 – You read the beginning of the sentence or paragraph. When you stop reading your child starts reading and continues until the end of the sentence or paragraph.
  • Echo Reading – You read a paragraph, your child repeats you and reads the same paragraph (very good for teaching how to use expression and read punctuation).
    • Paired Reading – Take turns reading to each other, you read a page then your child reads a page.

What to do After Reading:

  • Talk about the story/text you have read.
  • For fiction texts have your child retell the events of the story in order. Was there a problem and solution? Who were the characters? Where did the story happen (setting)?
  • For informational texts retell some facts and information shared in the text.
  • Have your child summarize the story telling only the most important parts.
  • Ask your child questions about the text. For example:
    • What connections can you make to the story?
    • What questions do you have about the story?
    • What does this story/text make you think about?
    • If you wrote the story how would you make it end?
  • Ask your child if there were some words in the text they did not know. Go back and talk about what those words mean.

The Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk has a few short videos for parents with great ideas for how to support your child in developing comprehension and vocabulary skills. Here they are:

There are some websites with texts you can access with your child for free to practice reading.  

  1. CommonLit –  This site has articles for students in grades 3 and above that you and your child may find interesting and appropriate.  The site has tagged each article with a suggested grade level, genre, and Lexile level.  Each article has some sample assessment questions about the text, a link to “Paired Texts” which are texts with similar themes, topics, or writing styles, and a Parent Guide that suggests some questions to discuss with your child and also has some accompanying video clips you could watch together.
  1. Science News for Students – This site also has articles, mostly nonfiction or informational, and mostly focused on grades 5-12.  All articles have further readings that can be done with each article and a “Power Words” glossary. If you sign up for their free weekly “cheat sheet” newsletter and register on the site for free you will be able to find the readability level of the passages. This will help you know what grade level it might be appropriate for. Instead of Lexile ranges this site uses a Flesch-Kincaid score that represents a grade level.  For example, a score of 5.2 means grade 5 month 2.