Tips To Help Your Child Become A Strong Reader (NAPSA)—To help you start a new chapter in helping your child read better, the Partnership for Readingoffers thesetips: Talk to your children and encourage them to talk. Include vocabulary lessons in everyday activities, explaining to your children what things are called and having them tell you what things are and what words mean. With younger children (birth to pre-K), talk and sing. Recite nursery rhymes and other verses with repeated sounds. Practice the alphabet. Use simple words and simple sentences so they can understand. And show enthusiasm. With older children (kindergarten and older), ask questions and answer questions. Engage in conversation about their day. Show interest in what they have to say. Understand the processes of reading. Know the areas in which your children need help. If they have difficulty sounding out words, focus on phonic skills by playing rhyming games and putting sounds together. If they struggle in reading a paragraph or page, work on fluency skills by rereading familiar paragraphs or books. Children often enjoy reading to you a book you may have read to them several times. Point out printed words to your children at home, at the grocery store, driving down the street. Make it a game. As your children are reading, watch or listen for passages where they may struggle or have problems. Have them reread that section until they are comfortable with it. Doing so will build their fluency skills, or their ability to read text accurately and quickly. Ask your children questions about what they have read and Z READING Ad IS T) FUN—Children enjoy reading you a book that you may haveread to them often. help them think about it. Have them retell the story. Talk with your children about the sequence of events in the story and about the characters. Doing this will build comprehension skills. * Create a quiet, special place in your homefor your children to read, write and draw. Have your children use that reading space every day. Keep reading materials in places where your children will see them and can access them. For more information, visit the Partnership for Reading’s Web site at www.nifl.gov/partnership forreading. The Partnership for Reading is a collaborative effort of the National Institute for Literacy, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Education.
