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, and I’m always looking for tips for Teaching Reading to Multiple Kids.
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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.
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