Learning to read is a magical process. For some kids you just show them a few books and they magically take off. Others take what seems like a lifetime to learn. My daughter was more like the first child. She suddenly took off in her reading. My boys struggled more, and I was always looking for quick reading tips to help them with their reading.
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We’ve been using All About Reading 1* and All About Reading 2* (future Ticia here, we’ve now completed the remaining two levels, and I can’t sing high enough praises for All About Reading) for a while now, and I have some quick tips for reading that I’ve figured out in the past few months years I wanted to share with you.
Mark up your reading workbook
Batman struggled for the longest time on the open versus closed syllable words when he was working on those lessons. His breakthrough came when I started drawing lines to show the syllables, and then he took it over and that made all the difference.
Label pictures
This is one my daughter came up with on her own one day while playing on my phone. But it reminded me of assignments I gave to my first graders. It works wondrously well with reluctant writers. This assignment is only limited by your imagination. They can draw the picture and label what’s in it. You can take a picture on the phone and edit it using one of the many photo editing programs available. You can print out a picture and label it. Why does this work so well? Because labels don’t require full sentences, they can just write single words or short phrases.
Write a comic
Why you ask do two of my reading tips involve writing? Well because there’s a proven tie between writing and reading. They improve each other. This one obviously is not done, but the idea is sound, and much like the labels it has the advantage of seeming like an easy assignment.
Use Buddy Reading
This one probably deserves a post all its own, but I’ll do a quick plug for it here. This has probably been the biggest boost to my kids reading recently. Have them read to each other, it helps in more ways than I care to go into right now.
And maybe in the end you’ll be lucky enough to get this note:
In case you can’t decode the phonetically written note: Mom you are a good teacher.
And my heart melted.
Sweet note 🙂 Anna’s class use a lot of writing apps on iPads to reinforce their language arts program. We don’t do much e-education at home – no time for that 🙂
I”m betting she gets enough e-education at school, so no need to do more at home 🙂
Though, if she’s like my boys she would argue there’s no such thing as enough screen time.
I have a drawer full of little notes like that, photos of lovely things they’ve written on our black board or white board. One day (like in the real distant future) I’m going to put them in a scrap book for me to soak up in my dotage!
I’ve still got some great notes from when I was teaching 10 years ago, they make me smile.
Great tips! I was trying to decide if I should move Sammy on to All About Reading level 2 now that we finished level 1. But wasn’t quite ready to do that. Jolanthe suggested started all about spelling level 1 and now reading this post I think that is just what we will do. We are reading the stories again and playing the games. I think I will be calling out words and have Sammy spell them on the white board with the letter tiles too 🙂
I’ll probably be doing the same thing with Princess. She’s almost done with level 1, and I want to give her brothers some breathing room for them to be able to work on level 2 without her catching up.
Good tips and that note is adorable!!
Great tips! I’m sure my kids would enjoy any and all of these activities!
Looking forward to that post on Buddy reading 🙂
Now I just need to get my butt in gear and get it written for next week……..
Great tips. Love the note, those are always so special.
Great post.
Would love for you to link it up at my new Empty Your Archive link party which is a chance to dust off great posts from your archive – would really love to see you there, Alice @ Mums Make Lists x
Done 🙂
I will be trying the labeling idea!