Is your kid struggling with reading and reading comprehension?
Here are some questions for parents out there: Is your child struggling with literacy skills? Are they unmotivated to read for you? Does your reader feel embarrassed when their friends at school are able to read at a higher level? When reading is difficult for a child, it can also make parenting tricky. How can you help your child boost their literacy skills while maintaining their self-esteem and keeping them motivated? We will be going over some useful teaching points and activities that will help you overcome challenges that many parents face while trying to help a struggling reader.
Strategies: An overview of how to help your child with reading struggles
There are numerous activities and strategies that parents can use to assist a struggling reader to increase their literacy abilities whether in school or by teaching a child at home. How do parents measure an individual child’s literacy skills? In the modern world, there are a multitude of resources to measure literacy. Many of these resources go beyond the simple act of setting goals in reading and writing and utilize more functional and in-depth criteria to measure literacy. Culture, problem-solving, comprehension, and communication are all important factors when teaching language and connecting learning with literacy. Helping your child with learning challenges and reading struggles will require a multi-strategy approach in order to help your child improve their reading skills.
Two important teaching concepts must be sustained when teaching literacy: exposure and consistency. Exposure simply requires that you create more opportunities for your reader to practice literacy skills, and consistency requires that you provide those opportunities frequently to struggling readers.
Depending on specific challenges and struggles of a child’s reading disability, parents can teach with multi-sensory approaches to engage the reader with more activities and avenues of learning than traditional school methods. Multi sensory approaches provide more opportunities for your child to access the information and overcome reading challenges.
Listed below are 12 strategies you can utilize to aid your child with their reading difficulties.
12 Strategies to help struggling readers
Increase exposure to literacy activities
One way to provide your child with more exposure and consistency to literacy activities is to provide them with access to literature that is not only age-appropriate but meets the individual at or directly above their current level of reading development. A child will feel more confident in their reading skills by reading a passage in a book that may be at their age and grade level. Setting a goal to integrate a slightly higher or more challenging reading level once in a while will help exercise the tools they are close to mastering or have mastered. This assures that a variety of older and new goals are practiced simultaneously while increasing consistency and exposure for your struggling reader.
Make sure you are focusing on the phonetic sounds of each letter of the alphabet when you are teaching, not just the letter name. Provide activities that practice blending 2 sounds together, and set a goal to move to CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant). If CVC words are difficult, moving on to higher levels and more complex words will be even more challenging to decode, so these types of words must be understood before you move on.
A verified and easy way to increase learning new words is to have a new, short list of snap words or vocabulary words to spell and talk about together. Set a goal of at least 5 words per week. Discuss each letter, what the word means, and develop fun activities to teach helpful ways to visualize that word. You can create literacy activities with fun plots or short stories teaching students about how the word is formed. For example, a word goal might be “cat”. The letter “c” sounds a lot like “see”. “A” is a letter that starts the word apple, a common word that students learn when exposed to the alphabet in early learning and developing reading and literacy skills. The letter “T” sounds just like the word “tea”. Suddenly you have a funny story about seeing your cat drink some delicious apple tea. Creating activities that connect letters and words to helpful visuals can help decrease recall time and improve reading skills.
Write a silly story teaching students to use the vocabulary words of the week. Save your stories so that you view them again together to practice old word goals and keep them fresh and easy to recall. Teaching your students to keep word banks are helpful for recall.
Find new ways and times to read
Reading doesn’t have to be limited to Reading Workshop activities during school hours or a prescribed reading homework set time. Literacy awareness and activities can happen anywhere. Out in public, take advantage of the visual signs we see everyday, by seeking traffic or pedestrian symbols, or popular restaurant signage and text in menus. Start by teaching high frequency words that have a visual; ones that are seen repeatedly or often. Read about favorite topics, or the instructions for a favorite game together, or even the backs of trading cards. Seeking reading materials centered around a favored character, subject, or game can help keep a student’s motivation up.
Boost reading comprehension
A lot of struggling readers have what we call a lack of “active thinking” when they are learning. Active thinking is what most of us use while reading information that makes us stop, consider, re-read, and question information in the text. Some teaching and learning strategies to tackle this might be to have your child read a short passage in a book, then cover that chunk of text with their hand, and have them tell you in their own words what they remember from the text.
Another strategy is similar but is more interactive. When reading books with your child, pause at appropriate breaks in the text. Ask them questions about the plot line, or their opinions about how a character might be feeling in a particular situation based on the context clues. Using colored sticky page tabs are useful to categorize questions and they are helpful in identifying themes within the story.
After reading a book or chapter together, have your child draw a picture based on the plot and vocabulary words they remember. Drawing their thoughts can help solidify ambiguous concepts. Any activities that require students to transfer information from the brain to the page are helpful activities.
Make sure your child knows why they are reading certain books or passages. If a child is not aware of the reason for learning about a particular topic, you risk losing their motivation to read it. Try to find grade-level topics, but be sure you are seeking a level that your reader will feel confident with.
Read passages together and keep it light and fun
When reading is a struggle for your student, read with them to get their reading skills warmed up. Be expressive, and give emotion to the character’s speech. Make it exciting to read! You can even take turns with reading passages or sentences, lightening the load and the pressure. A lively read aloud is a great way to keep a student’s interest.
Maintain consistency
Create a reasonable goal for a reading schedule for your kids, or build special routines that help you practice reading consistently every day. Consistency may be built into the schedule, but attempt to make the fun consistent too. Just because you may have created literacy activities or routines at home doesn’t mean they need to be the same every time. A good way to maintain consistency but break it up: Do some research about a non-fiction topic your student may be interested in. Arrange a time everyday to complete some type of literacy activity based on that topic. Let’s say your child loves penguins. Find an appropriate book with information about penguins. Take some time to preview the book, ask questions, and write ideas down. Then, after a read aloud with the book, have your child make their own nonfiction informational research page about penguins. Have your child use the factual information they learned by reading the book. If you are seeking additional activities, you can have your child create a fictional story based on penguins. You could also take the time to research the author and find if they have written any other books that your child might be interested in. It’s always exciting finding a new book by your favorite author!
Embrace flexibility
Look into modifying your child’s reading schedule, or reading homework requirements. Having a certain overwhelming amount of homework to do in addition to the actual difficulty with reading is not beneficial for anyone. Flexibility is paramount to bridging the gap between frustration and being encouraged to move forward. Seeking helpful ways to promote a positive mindset about reading will help us move onto our next tip: maintaining self-esteem.
Harness motivation and keep self-esteem levels high
Improving self-esteem around literacy is an extremely essential component of achieving it. Low self-esteem can lead to frustration, disruptive behavior, dwindling motivation, and depression. There are several ways to treat these issues, and they can be explored in behavior management methods, improving home/school communications, providing a curriculum that is structured and appropriately scaffolded, and creating tools to facilitate easier scheduling and organization.
Build an inventory of coping skills to aid your reader
Coping skills are the bread and butter for struggling readers to better build their reading strategies. These can include seeking a private tutor or involving a reading specialist. Speak to your school district and ask about services related to struggling readers. This may even include initiating an IEP (Individual Education Plan) so a reading specialist can be legally provided by the district to set appropriate learning goals. Coping skills can be used at home as well. Talk with your child about appropriate ways to reduce stress when reading. Most children have a good idea about what calms them down. Reading in a set-up tent can reduce outside stimuli, and help a distracted reader concentrate, or relax when they need less people around to hear them read. A few pillows and a flashlight can go a long way. Reading needs to be fun!
Turn on your closed captioning
Closed captioning isn’t just useful for the hard of hearing or translating languages. By showing the words as they are spoken on the screen, children can start pairing what they see and hear. The advantage to this is since there are many children’s shows that have repeating themes and routines, and your child can be exposed to the same vocabulary repeatedly, all while watching their favorite characters. When you are watching the closed captioning with your child, making sure you point out goal words you might be learning.
Use technology to help a struggling reader
There are a variety of computer activities and tablet-based games and applications geared toward struggling readers. Many support types of applications encourage children to write their own story, with animated videos. Other programs pair words and vocabulary with interactive visuals. Additionally, you can find platforms which are helpful to a child in customizing the way the written words look, such as word size, color, background color, and other features. Your child can even read the text while the program highlights words at a predetermined speed. These multi-sensory approaches toward technology give the kids fun activities to complete all while reading, learning and building their reading skills.
Give your child a sense of responsibility by creating a personal email account for them, so you can write back and forth with each other or to their teachers. Writing letters to others can be a fun and interesting way to practice vocabulary words.
Helping your reading with special needs
Literacy for struggling readers is difficult. If a struggling reader is also managing a disability such as ADD, ADHD, or Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and others, the combination of challenges can be profound. Interesting visuals and interactive platforms really help with motivation. Check in with your local school district, and they can direct you towards Special Education services, where your child may benefit from extra learning time in special education classes and activities that are specifically helpful for reading (if they are in a mainstream classroom), or other alternatives to better support your child.
Enjoy Reading as a Parent
Sometimes the best and easiest type of literacy exposure you can offer to your child is to increase the time you are reading for yourself. When children see their parents or other adults reading often, it demonstrates to them that reading can be necessary, informational, and even enjoyable. Talk to them about what books or articles you are reading about (remembering to keep it in an age-appropriate context) and ask their opinion about the topics. If you share in the joy that reading brings to you with your child, they will be more inclined to follow in their parents’ footsteps.
