Parent involvement in early literacy is directly connected to academic achievement. Children need parents to be their reading role models with daily practice in order to navigate successfully through beginning literacy skills.
Here are some strategies for your child’s literacy success:
- Point to each word on the page as you read. This beginning literacy strategy will assist children with making print/story/illustration connections. It also helps build a child’s tracking skills from one line of text to the next one.
- Read the title and ask your child to make a prediction. Beginning and seasoned readers alike need to make predictions before reading a story. This will go a long way to ensure that a child incorporates previewing and prediction in his or her own reading practices both now and in the future.
- Take “picture walks.” Help your child use the picture clues in most early readers and picture books to tell the story before reading.
- Model fluency while reading, and bring your own energy and excitement for reading to your child.
- Ask your child questions after reading every book. Reading comprehension is the reason we read — to understand. Help your child explain his or her understanding of any given story in comparison to another, and perhaps to share a personal experience similar to a problem or theme within a story.
- Connect reading and writing if possible. The connection between reading, writing and discussion should be incorporated with daily literacy practice. Modeling the formation of sentences aligned with the words of a story is crucial for a child to begin making a neural interconnectedness between reading and writing.
If your child needs extra help with reading and writing, at Banner Literacy your child is in the best of hands. We will perform assessments regularly to monitor your child’s literacy progress. If we determine that he or she has needs intervention, we offer a variety of effective therapies to stimulate literacy development and enhance your ability as parents to support the child’s development in everyday situations. For more information, give us a call today.