This page is designed to provide you with useful tips and suggestions to support your child’s literacy development. Please contact any of the literacy teachers with any questions.
What Do Good Readers Do?
- Make connections with their own life experiences and with other books they have read
- Make, confirm, and adjust predictions
- Visualize what they are reading
- Use picture clues to help determine unknown words and to support comprehension
- Self-correct
- Look for words they know
- Look for word parts
- Reread
- Sequence events
- Summarize
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What Can Families Do at Home?
- Follow recipes to make favorite dishes and deserts
- Write letters or emails to friends and family members
- Write messages to each other around the house
- Write thank you notes
- Make your own greeting cards
- Write a schedule for a fun day of activities together
- Write and read events on a calendar
- Make scrapbooks and write captions underneath the pictures
- Play board games (read the directions and/or game cards)
- Write and perform a puppet show or play
- Create imaginative and personal narratives together
- Write a family vacation journal
- Read menus
- Set aside a regular quiet, relaxing time for everyone to enjoy a good book, newspaper, magazine, etc.
- Visit your local library on a regular basis
- Visit museums and share in the reading of signs at the exhibits
- Parents can read stories aloud
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What Should We Do When Reading Aloud to Our Child?
- Find a comfortable, relaxing place to read
- Choose a book that your child AND you will enjoy
- Vary the type (fiction/nonfiction) and the length of books
- Encourage your child to join in the reading of parts that repeat
- Encourage your child to make comments and predictions during the reading
- Read at a good pace- Don’t read too fast
- Read with expression- changing your voice for different characters
- Ask some questions that promote discussion- not yes/no questions
- Discuss the connections you make with your own personal experiences or with other books you have read
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How Can We Support Our Child While S/he is Reading?
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If s/he makes a mistake:
- Don’t jump in to correct.
- Give the child time to notice that the word is incorrect and encourage him/her to reread.
Please use questions like these as guided prompts. Make sure to use these questions as guides instead of only relying on "sounding out the word".
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Ask:
- What word would make sense?
- What is the first sound?
- What could the word be?
- Ask the child to cover part of the word and read one part of the word.
- Repeat for the other part of the word.
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Ask:
- Does the word sound right?
- Does the word make sense in the sentence?
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Say:
- Keep your finger on the word and finish the sentence. Pretend the word is covered.
- What word would make sense in that place?
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Before Reading
- Look at the title, author, and pictures
- Talk about what you already know about the topic of the book
- Predict what will happen or what will be learned
- Make connections with your own life experiences or with other books you have read
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During Reading
- Talk about the illustrations
- Change predictions and create new predictions based on what has already been read
- Talk about how the characters might feel during parts of the story
- Make connections with your own life experiences or with other books you have read
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After Reading
- Retell the story
- Illustrate his/her favorite part
- Discuss how his/her predictions compared to the actual events
- Make connections with your own life experiences or with other books you have read
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What are Some Questions To Discuss After Reading?
- Would you like to have a friend like the main character? Why or why not?
- Would you have made the same choices as a certain character?
If yes, which ones?
If no, what would you have decided?
- Would you recommend this to a friend? Why?
- What would you tell a person that this book is mostly about?
- What do you think would happen in a sequel to this book?
- How would the story be the same or different if it happened in your town or neighborhood?
- How would you change the ending?
- How would this story be different if it was told from a different character’s point of view?
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