Isn’t it wonderful when children have a love of reading? A passion for reading lasts a lifetime and brings the whole world to our fingertips.
As parents I think it is common that we invest a lot of time and energy into helping our children learn to read in those early years but once they are confident and independent readers we often leave them to their own devices.
Are there things we can be doing with our bigger kids to help them continue to get the most from the reading?
I think there are and would love to share some simple reading tips with you that are easy to incorporate into day-to-day reading activities.
One of my favourite ways to support reading in a class or at home is with a High-Five For Reading celebratory wall.
First we simply cut out card handprints that can be used as bookmarks. The children love that they are fun and personal to them. Here’s Biscuit, who wanted to be French for the day, preparing his next bookmark!
The joy of these simple bookmarks is that you can write a short challenge/target on to the palm and the children use the fingers to record their success. It’s really easy to target the task to the needs, abilities and interests of the individual child and recording on fingers breaks things down into manageable chunks for the children.
For example, for a young reader just starting out, you might want to be encouraging them to read every day after school. You can use the High-Five Book Mark to colour in or draw a smiley face on a finger when they read on Monday, then another finger when they have read on Tuesday etc. When the child has completed their hand they can pop it up on the High-Five wall to show off their success.
A celebratory High-Five Wall is a great way to break reading tasks down into manageable chunks and because it is so hands-on children can actually feel and see their progress. You might like to add a reward structure to it too, and offer a treat for every 5 hands completed perhaps?
Hands-On Challenge Ideas For Early Readers
Here’s some ideas for labelling the palm of the hands for early or reluctant readers to encourage regular reading. Choose a task the right size for your child to succeed and build up the task level slowly.
- I read a sentence on my own. (Decorate a finger each time it’s completed)
- I read a page on my own.
- I read a chapter.
- Books I have read.
- Draw a character on each finger.
- Draw something that happened in the story.
Hands-On Challenge Ideas For Established Readers
Once your child is up and running with reading you can use the High Five idea to encourage them to really think about what they’re reading and the kind of words they’re coming across.
Here are some of my favourite palm labels, I’m sure you’ll be able to think of lots of your own too.
- New words.
- Great adjectives.
- Great adverbs.
- Synonym hunt e.g. words to use instead of ‘said’.
- Tricky spellings.
- Words that rhyme with…
- Words to look up in the dictionary.
- Words beginning with…
- Words ending with…
As you can see it’s easy to adjust the task to the needs and ability of your child. I love that the High-Five idea can be adapted for short and long tasks and changed for each book or even each chapter, in fact as often as you like.
Perhaps the children will enjoy setting their own challenges too? My youngest likes looking out for long words when he’s reading and will often set himself the challenge of spotting words with 8 or more letters. a great and simple way to expand his vocabulary.
What if you have a reluctant reader?
The High-Five idea works really well for reluctant readers too. You can easily break the steps down into manageable chunks so instead of recording each new book onto a finger you can make the task much smaller and maybe do a sentence a finger, or a page a finger. That way a reluctant reader has small goals that they can actually reach and quickly gain the reward of a High-Five for the wall. Perhaps you could add an additional incentive and offer a celebratory reward when they have reached 3 High-Fives?
Do We Need To Read Out Loud To Fluent Readers?
My last tip is to encourage you to continue to read out loud to your children even if they are fluent readers. Why? Loads of reasons:
- It’s snuggly, cuddly good and gives you quality time together.
- It helps develop their auditory stamina. Concentrating, listening and digesting information over long periods is tiring and children need to practise this. A good auditory stamina and attention span will help them enormously in school across all subjects areas.
- Whatever their reading ability it is great to read a story aloud to them that is just above their level. This might be introducing a younger reader to a first non-picture book, right up to introducing your teen to Dickens. All the time you will be stretching their comprehension skills, and expanding their vocabulary range.
- By reading out loud you drip feed lots of reading tips to them and can model how to manage a tricky word or text and what to do if you come across an unknown word.By reading out loud yourself it’s a great way to encourage readers of all ages to read out loud too. This helps them become well paced and expressive readers themselves. This can help them feel confident about speaking publicly and may even inspire a love of theatre and acting too.
- Sharing books together is a great way to really talk about what you’ve read and share ideas and opinions. Ask each other questions about the text. How is such and such a character feeling? What from the text tells us this? What do you think is going to happen next? Why? Encouraging children to consider texts in this way will really help them develop their own writing skills and styles too.
- It’s a great way to chat about your personal ideas, feelings and beliefs. When my daughter reached her teens I found sharing books a great way in to discussing lots of thoughts and feelings that otherwise just may not have come up in day-to-day conversations. It was a great way to really touch base, share and support my increasingly independent daughter. I will endeavour to continue to do the same with my boys right through their teens too.
I hope you’ve found these reading tips useful for World Book Day or indeed any day of the year!