Ongoing support should occur at home to ensure that children retain their reading skills. Research indicates that skills will be lost over long holiday periods. Students that continue to read over holiday periods usually improve and retain skills taught in school.
What You Can Do
Beginner Stages:
- listen to and encourage children to chime in for familiar nursery rhymes and children's songs
- play rhyming games and take turns with rhymes e.g., I have fun when I _____(run) Let me look at a ______(book)
- role play with children - act out familiar TV characters or favourite movie characters - play school
- find a good book of poems and learn one per week by encouraging children to chime in on the familiar parts until they can almost recite the entire poem
- find wooden, felt or magnetic letters to play with, take turn making your names with them or draw the letter in the air with your finger and ask your child to find the concrete letter after watching you
- engage children in productive conversations about family members, TV shows, favourite places to visit etc.
- play alphabet body shapes
- with your finger write a letter on your child's back and let them guess what it is, give hints if necessary.
Next Level
- play songs and encourage children to chime in regularly, sing the song without the music;
- clap the syllables in compound words;
- use magnetic, felt or wooden letters to improve letter recognition and initial and final consonant sounds. E.g., find the letter that sand begins with and find the letter that sand ends with;
- reread story books pointing to each word, after reading the selection ask the child to find words at random;
- cut strips with words that are in the story and see if certain words can be identified;
- read a poem of the week and discuss the meaning;
- play silly sentences 'Silly Suzie sells suckers', 'Big Billy buys bananas' take turns and provide prompts;
- use 'high interest/low vocabulary books and reread them until the child begins reciting them;
- make letters out of dough, plasticene, yarn, sidewalk chalk;
- write a diary statement together each night before bed or each morning;
- cut and paste collages with newspapers and magazines e.g.,
- cut out everything that begins with a d,r,s,etc.;
- encourage creative thoughts with starters like 'what if cars had square wheels', 'what if water was poison'...
- have children identify parts of the word e.g., say snowman without the man, say man with the 'm' sound;
- encourage children to identify all the sounds of familiar words - cup has a 'K' 'uh' and a 'pu' sound
- reread easy to read and predictable story books together to develop independent fluency;
- use the words to familiar books for flash cards;
- encourage children to put common letter sounds together e.g., play - pl sounds like 'pl' and ask them other words that have the pl sound use dr, bl, cl, sh, sl, br, fl, sk etc.;
- play rhyming word games; something that rhymes with man is _____, something that rhymes with up is_____;
- make flash cards with personal pronouns (I, he, she etc.) include was, has, is and then add a few nouns, encourage children to arrange the cards to make a sentence;
- keep a diary of each book read, include something about the book; play expanding sentences - start with a simple sentence and take turns, 'I rode my bike', 'I rode my red bike', 'I rode my big, red bike', I rode my big, red bike to my friends;
- practice learning word families and change initial consonants, final consonants and vowels; an, fan, ran, pan, dog, log, fog, hog etc. encourage children to help you write lists;
- engage children in discussions about movies, cartoons and children's shows, e.g., why did he.......what would happen if....
- changing or deleting the beginning, middle, and ending sounds of words in a pocket chart to make new words;
