Our Caring Tutors Can Help
For kids of all ages to do well in school, they need to be good readers. Not just to bump their language arts and literature grades, but to improve their critical and analytical thinking skills, train their attention spans, and flex their creative muscles. The skills an attentive, engaged reader develops are handy in every area inside and outside of school, so it’s important to help students of all ages develop their reading capabilities. Here are some great ways to help kids both young and old become confident, capable, and even enthusiastic bookworms!
Encouraging Young Readers
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1. Read Out Loud
For young children, reading can be an intimidating task. The effort required to sound out new words, think about their meaning, and understand them in context is a serious challenge for growing readers. While it’s definitely important to work on silent and individual reading, reading out loud is also a fantastic tool parents, tutors, and teachers can use to encourage reading comprehension.
Reading books aloud to children from time to time yields great outcomes. It lets kids focus on the meat of the story—the plot and themes. It takes away some of the “work” of reading, which often discourages young readers from trying. This might make kids more excited about reading and exploring books down the road, once their individual reading skills have developed. Reading aloud also means you can introduce readers to stories a step or two above their reading level, exposing them to new writing styles, vocabulary words and more involved plot and character development!
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2. Create Reading Guides
When kids are going through a book, give them “reading guides” to help them denote important events and keep track of characters. This will help them stay on-task while they read and assist with reading comprehension. It’s also good to include open-ended questions, like what they think will happen next or if they think a character handled a situation correctly. These kinds of short prompts will help grow their critical thinking and creative skills.
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3. Keep a Word List
In The Word Collector by Peter H. Reynolds, the main character, Jerome, keeps track of new words he sees each day. Having young readers keep a list of new words like this will help them increase their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. It’s also easy to use this list as the basis of a new activity, such as creating a poem or writing their own short story!
For the Older Kids:
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1. Read Out Loud
For young children, reading can be an intimidating task. The effort required to sound out new words, think about their meaning, and understand them in context is a serious challenge for growing readers. While it’s definitely important to work on silent and individual reading, reading out loud is also a fantastic tool parents, tutors, and teachers can use to encourage reading comprehension.
Reading books aloud to children from time to time yields great outcomes. It lets kids focus on the meat of the story—the plot and themes. It takes away some of the “work” of reading, which often discourages young readers from trying. This might make kids more excited about reading and exploring books down the road, once their individual reading skills have developed. Reading aloud also means you can introduce readers to stories a step or two above their reading level, exposing them to new writing styles, vocabulary words and more involved plot and character development!
-
2. Create Reading Guides
When kids are going through a book, give them “reading guides” to help them denote important events and keep track of characters. This will help them stay on-task while they read and assist with reading comprehension. It’s also good to include open-ended questions, like what they think will happen next or if they think a character handled a situation correctly. These kinds of short prompts will help grow their critical thinking and creative skills.
-
3. Keep a Word List
In The Word Collector by Peter H. Reynolds, the main character, Jerome, keeps track of new words he sees each day. Having young readers keep a list of new words like this will help them increase their vocabulary and reading comprehension skills. It’s also easy to use this list as the basis of a new activity, such as creating a poem or writing their own short story!
