Literacy

Helping Your Child Read At Home

When helping your child read at home, several strategies may be used
to aid in decoding unknown words.
These are strategies that our Reading Recovery program uses to
help children become better readers.


Tell the child to look at the picture.  You may tell the child the word is
something that can be seen in the picture, if that is the case.


Tell the child to look for chunks in the word, such as it in sit,
or at in cat, or ot in hot.


Ask the child to get his/her mouth ready to say the word by
shaping the mouth for the beginning letter.


Ask the child if the word looks like another word he/she knows.
Does cook look like book?  Or hat like cat?


Ask the child to go on and read to the end of the sentence.
Often by reading the other words in context, the child can
figure out the unknown word.


If the child says the wrong word while reading, ask questions like:
Does it make sense?
Does it sound right?
Does it look right?