Tips for Reading with your Child

• Partner Reading- take turns reading with your child. Depending on the book, you can switch every line, every page or every paragraph. Knowing that he/she is responsible for reading the entire book can be overwhelming for your child. Partner reading eliminates these feelings and lets your child know that you are working as a team. This strategy also gives you a chance to model reading with fluency and expression.
• Choral Reading- read a section of the book along with your child (simultaneously).   Together, re-read this section. Once your child feels comfortable with the words, begin to lower your voice and hand over responsibility of the reading to your child. Soon your child will be reading the section on his/her own. Repeat with other sections. 
• Echo Reading- read a passage or small chunk of the text, child “echos” what you have read. Make sure your child is tracking along as you read.  This strategy is great for more difficult texts.
• Read Aloud- read to your child as they track along. This allows you to model appropriate reading as well as help your child match the spoken word to its written form.
• Tape reading- child tracks along as he/she listens to the story recorded on tape. Once the child is comfortable, he then attempts to read the text on his own. This strategy is only effective if the child tracks along in the story as he is listening. 

Assessment for Reading Instruction, by McKenna & Stahl (2003)

Reading Comprehension: Strategies That Work

Discussing texts read is a great way to foster growth in reading.  When discussing with your child, consider the following areas: 

• Making connections between prior knowledge and the text
• Questioning
• Visualizing- create a movie using the words of the text
• Making Inferences- use clues from the text and background knowledge to better understand what is being read
• Determining Important Ideas
• Synthesizing- combining new and old information to create an original idea
• Fix-up Strategies- stop reading to clarify, summarize, and/or find the main idea.  Re-reading is one "fix-up" strategy.

Stuck on a Word?

When students come across an unfamiliar word, there are many strategies they can use to accurately decode this word. 

• Look and listen for letter patterns
• Look for key words or picture clues
• Look for little words in big words
• Backtrack.  Read it again.
• Say the beginning sound and read the rest of the sentence
• Does it sound right?
• Does it make sense?
• Skip it and go on.  Use context clues.