Reading To, With AND ByYour Children

Strategies for providing effective reading support to your children at home

Yes ?????• Feel frustrated? Does your child get frustrated? • Tell your child to sound it out? • Tell your child not to look at the picture? • Make your child work at EVERY word? • Tell your child NOT to go back and reread? • Do you avoid reading to your children? • Are you concerned about the books your children are

reading are too difficult? • Do you drill your children with sight-word cards? • Would you like some simple strategies to teach your

child to help them attack words they don’t know?

RELAX!!!!!!!! Reading with your children at home should be

fun…. Make it that way!

"Literacy development is not linear. Normal growth has spurts, plateaus and regressions. Healthy organs (brain) dance, not march, and the curriculum should dance also. Spikes happen after stable behavior and you cannot predict it. Variation is to be expected. We often experience divergent outcomes from similar beginnings."

(Vygotsky)

Trust yourself!

• To know your child and what they need. • Example: I have never played baseball but

as I worked with my son in wee-ball I noticed he was not hitting the ball very hard, as he swung his back foot all the way around and would hit the ball on the narrow part of his bat. I had to trust myself to my child fix that. I had to train him by stepping on his back foot.

Trust

• Trust is a crucial component for your child as well.

To put it simply…

• Just read to your child, with your child and by your child at least 15-20 minutes every night.

• It’s not about sight words or phonics or remembering rules.

• Making meaning should be our number 1 goal; Reading to learn and reading for entertainment.

• You and your child should enjoy this time!

Recent studies on high frequency words (sight words):

• “A potential drawback to reading words in isolation is that it may reinforce the notion that reading is simply about identifying individual words. This could lead to word by word reading for some children, which is potentially a problem for some children because the word is not necessarily the carrier of essential meaning. The phrase is the key component. Practicing words in isolation too much could have a negative effect.” (Rasinski, 1990, 1994)

“If kids become readers by reading, then we must have texts that will entice them to pick up a book day after day. This has as much to do with having texts that are accessible in terms of students reading fluency as with having literature that interest them because of the topic.”

Joanne Hindley, In the Company of Children

What Really Matters?

• Kids Need to Read a Lot!Allington says, “In learning to read it is true that

reading practice-just reading-is a powerful contributor to the development of accurate, fluent, high-comprehension reading. In fact, if I were to required to select a single aspect of the instructional environment to change, my first choice would be creating a schedule that supported dramatically increased quantities of reading during the school day.”

“Unless children realize that reading is a source of valuable knowledge about themselves and the culture of which they live they will never become truly literate adults. Unless they see that reading is functional, that it can help them achieve their ends, that it can produce answers to problems, and help entertain and amuse them, they will not become hooked on reading” (Smith and Elley, Learning to Read in New Zealand)

“What is required for a child to be eager to learn to read is not knowledge about reading’s practical usefulness, but a fervent belief that being able to read will open him to a world of wonderful experiences, permit him to shed his ignorance, understand the world, and become master of his fate” (Bruno and Zelan, Child’s Fascination with Meaning)

Shared Reading

One of the primary goals of shared reading or the shared book experience is that readers leave reading with a sense of enjoyment or satisfaction.

Shared Reading

• Shared reading is an approach where the bedtime story is replicated to enable the child to enjoy and participate in a story that would have been too difficult for them otherwise. It’s an opportunity for the child to see and hear what fluent reading sounds like, learn new words and observe how a reader approaches challenging text

Gradual Release of Responsibility(guiding principle for Reading with Meaning, Debbie Diller)

Reading To

Reading With(Shared reading)

Reading ByDegree of support determined byStudent ability and text level match

Focus on meaning/vocabulary always

Scaffolding

• “Scaffolding is the intentional, strategic support that teachers provide that allows children to complete a task they could not complete independently.” (Vygotsky, 1978)

• “To determine what kind and how much help is needed for a child to respond correctly to a task and to internalize the skills needed for independent performance.” (Ukrainetz 2006)

Parent Read Aloud

• “Sharing a book for the sheer pleasure of it is not only a natural parent-child activity, but also a great way to develop readers.” (Durkin 1966)

• Sadly, in many families, reading aloud ends once formal schooling begins even though the same benefits are experienced at home (improved vocabulary, comprehension and motivation).

Transitional readers (students beyond second grade):

“Students have not had sufficient prior experience in having discussions with adults about ideas, and therefore have no cultural sense of strategic understanding. They can be referred to as students who do not understand understanding, a problem that results from a lack of sophisticated conversation in the home—and in school”

Joanne Hindley, In the Company of Children

“We could consider transitional readers The Great Pretenders. Unless we look closely at what they are doing as readers and listen to what they have to tell us, we may not realize they are not growing as readers.”

Joanne Hindley, In the Company of Children

Easy strategies• Read the book first• Know the big idea or theme• Make predictions based on the title• Confirm, correct and revise predictions

throughout• Help them ask questions throughout• Help them make connections• Discuss new and interesting vocabulary*** model this, show them

The Reading Process/Cycle

Meaning/comprehension

Search

Anticipate

Make connections

Predict

Attend

Confirm or correct

Revise if necessary

Search/read

Paired/Choral/Echo Reading• Research by Keith Topping found that as little as 10-15

minutes per day of paired reading between a parent and child resulted in a significant improvement in the child’s reading.

• Reading together in a natural, comfortable manner, looking directly at the text while the student tracks with their finger. Adjust rate to match or “gently” push the student.

• Make corrections as necessary but do not interrupt reading for any decoding, word work lessons

• Release support when appropriate.• Echo: You read a sentence and the child repeats

Repeated readings

• Practice leads to improvements in the reading passage, but also of passages the students have not previously seen.

• As students become more fluent in one passage, their improved reading at both the word and sentence level transfer to new passages. (Samuels 1979)

• Fluency allows greater focus on comprehension.

Fluency Development Lesson (FDL)

• A short, predictable passage, such as a poem, is read aloud several times

• Meaning and vocabulary are discussed• A poem can be reread in different voices,

like the robotic, disfluent voice• Several choral/paired readings are

performed• Students practice independently • Students perform for an audience

Fast Start

• Parent reads poem to child several times with good expression (words should be tracked with finger by reader as model)

• Read the poem together, child tracks with finger

• Discuss meaning and vocabulary• Child reads independently• Engage in word study choosing 2-4

interesting words

Word Study example

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn.The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.Where’s the little boy that looks after the sheep?Under the haystack, fast asleep.

Orn: horn, corn, born, morning, tornEep: sheep, asleep, beep, peep, steep

Credits

• The Fluent Reader, by Timothy Rasinski• Using Scaffolding, The Reading Teacher,

McGee and Ukrainetz• What Really Matters for Struggling Readers,

Richard L. Allington• In the Company of Children, Joanne Hindley• Beyond Leveled Books, Szymusiak & Sibberson• On the Same Page, Janet Allen• Reading with Meaning, Debbie Diller

Video examples

• Shared reading with poetry• Shared writing, blending and segmenting• Guided thinking and reading (“readinking”)