Written especially for parents, Growing Readers provides monthly tips for raising strong readers and writers. All of our tip sheets are available in English and Spanish.
Parents want the best for their children. Reading can open a window on the world, bringing chances to learn, enjoy and create. Even though schools teach reading and writing, home is the first and best place for your child’s love of reading to grow.
This booklet (in English and Spanish) features dozens of fun activities parents can use to build the language skills of young children from birth to age 6. It has a reading checklist, typical language accomplishments for different age groups, and resources for children with reading problems or learning disabilities.
Establishing daily and weekly routines provides a helpful structure for learning at home. In this article, you’ll find a sample schedule for a typical day and suggestions for how to integrate a learning theme into the activities.
One of the keys to helping struggling readers is to provide them with books that they can and want to read. Fiction for struggling readers must have realistic characters, readable and convincing text, and a sense of the readers’ interests and needs. Non-fiction books, newspapers, magazines, even comic books can hook students on reading.
How do you choose books to read aloud with your child? There are many things to think about: how interesting the topic or characters might be for your child; an intriguing setting, time period, or plot; the liveliness or beauty of the language; or how engaging the illustrations are. Some books are more appropriate based on social and emotional development at each stage of a young child’s life. Find guidance here in choosing great read alouds.
Electronic children’s books are becoming more widely available. Here you’ll discover practical tips for sharing e-books with your child, and how to keep the focus on reading and the story.
Most beginning readers are inconsistent. Learn more about the characteristics of a beginning reader and simple techniques and tips to nurture your child’s skills and joy in reading.
As parent, you know how important it is to set aside some time everyday to read with your baby or toddler. If you’ve got a squiggler in your house, see if these tips help your reading time go a little more smoothly.
Learn how to teach children to write informational text through the use of focused read-alouds that include discussions of information book genre elements, features, and organizational structure. See examples of book compositions by second-grade authors that demonstrate how read-alouds can support young writers’ genre knowledge development.
Interactive writing makes the writing process visual to the whole class. Reading literature is an excellent way to initiate interactive writing in the class, and the teacher can continue using literature as the class does interactive writing with any new book that is read throughout the year.
This study of first and second graders looked at teacher-led read alouds as a way to introduce science concepts. Results suggest that multiple exposures to a related concept across different stories gave students more time to build a mental representation of important ideas. This evidence suggests that moving beyond a single text as a source for building students’ understanding is an important instructional approach.
