Read WITH Your Child
When you were a child, do you remember anyone reading with you?
I do. It was a nightly ritual: say prayers, brush teeth, choose a book for Dad to read while sitting next to us girls, go to bed, lights out.
This happened every night for years. I remember loving the pictures and there were books that I returned to obsessively: Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey, The Legend of the Bluebonnet by Tomie dePaolo, and Say Hello, Vanessa by Marjorie W. Sharmat to name a few. I would drink in the illustrations and will them into motion while Dad would patiently bring to life again and again the characters that were emblazoned in my imagination.
And every night when the story was read or reread, the pictures were absorbed and talked about. The characters were enriched with backstories and inferences. My imagination sharpened and my vocabulary expanded.
An enveloping arm held me firmly in place, helping me solidify and navigate my place in the world just as the characters were solidifying and navigating theirs in the imagination.
As I began learning letters and sounds, my eyes started shifting from the pictures to the words. The words on the page began to come alive. They were there for a reason. They meant something and they were presenting the story that I could decode.
Eventually, the shift from simply being mesmerized by letters to understanding their meaningful arrangement in words took place, and I began to read to my dad. When I would skip a word or a line, Dad silently brought his finger under the word or line, and would follow along until I was back on track.
My reading abilities took off.
Every child can make this transition! For some children, the transition may take longer, but it does happen. Read my blog post on why this works.
If your child struggles to read, reading with your child will help immensely! Your child’s time is a gift. Using this time to sit with your child to read reinforces that - especially for a child who struggles to read and feels left out in many situations.
The quality time you give your child speaks volumes.
Read carefully. Sitting with your child who struggles to read allows your child to hear you pronounce words. When you read with your child, use a tracker (finger, bookmark, index card, ruler). The tracker will help your child follow along on the page, see and hear words at the same time, and remove potential distractions from other words.
Take turns. This can remove a lot of stress. Determine the length (sentence, paragraph, page, chapter) by the length of the book, the closeness of the type, the difficulty your child exhibits when reading. Take turns at a natural stopping point so one person can complete a thought. Remember, there will come a day when your child will forget that you are taking turns and will continue to read. Roll with it. Your child will fatigue and realize you need a turn, and you can take it then.
Keep corrections to a minimum. Maybe your child mispronounced a few words. Take a mental note. If your child isn’t hesitating, let it go. If there is hesitation, sound the word out slowly, then pronounce it naturally, and offer a definition and explanation of its use in the story. If there is no hesitation but there are too many mistakes, maybe shorten the length of the turns or take a break. Everything is adjustable.
Finally, talk about what you read. Sometimes, a child who struggles to read gets so bogged down in the construction of words and sounds that the story loses pride of place. When you are able to bring that story to life with excitement, questions, inferences, and predictions, you will be amazed at the attention shift and stress release.
When reading with your child, this is your child’s time with you. During this time your child is revealing curiosity, understanding, creativity, struggles, strengths. You get to enrich this time by adding conversation, patience, understanding, and gentle guidance.
With you, your child will come to a greater appreciation of the power of story, the meaning of words, the possibilities of imagination, and the greatness of adults. With you, your child will learn to read.