Read Aloud Tips for Parents

While watching your child read, there are many ways you can help! You can encourage and watch for the following behaviors while reading with your child nightly.

1. Your child should use one-to-one matching while reading. This means your child uses his/her finger to point accurately to each word as they read it.

2. When stuck on a word, your child should use the following strategies to gather information to "decode" the word.
    Strategy 1: Check the picture. Students should look at the picture to see what they are reading matches the picture.
    Strategy 2: "Get your mouth ready for the word". When students are stuck, they should begin to say the first two or three letters of the word. By doing this, the brain begins to search for words that begin with that sound. What words does your child know that begins with that sound? (...and will "make-sense" in the sentence). Place one of the words back in the sentence. Does it make sense with the story? Does what you are reading look like the word you see on the page?
    Strategy 3: "Chunk it". Look for word families, blends, endings, beginnings, etc. that you know. What words do you know with those sounds? If your child is pronouncing a "nonsense" word, what "real" word do they know that sounds similar? Would the word make sense in the story? What word would "make-sense" there?
    Strategy 4: "Skip it". Students can get a "running start" from the beginning of the sentence and "skip" over the unknown word. For example: The ___ went meow. What word makes sense there? Students can use context clues from the sentence to discover meaning of unknown words. A sensible answer for this example is "cat". But looking at the length of the word in conjuction with beginning, middle, and ending sounds, students might discover that the word is "kitten" instead.

3. When your child has trouble with a word, but finally de-codes it, be sure your child goes back to the beginning of the sentence and re-reads the entire sentence! This is essential to maintain both comprehension and fluency of the story.

4. It is important for you to allow your child a "wait time" of 5-10 seconds while working on a difficult word. You want your child to become independent, to work it out by himself, so don't jump in to help too soon.  If a reasonable time has elasped, simply tell your child the word and go on. But insist that your child goes back to the beginning of the sentence and re-read the entire sentence.

5. Most of us were taught to "sound out" words in order to be able to read. However, many words cannot be sounded out! Therefore, students must use the meaning of pictures, meaning of the story, structure of the sentence, structure of the story, and the letters in each word, all equally to get the message from the printed page.

6. Eventually, your child's reading should become fluent. This means his/her reading will sound like talking. It should involve "expression" when necessary. To develop fluency, it is helpful to have several readings of the same book or parts of books. Often during the first reading, children are so busy de-coding the words, they cannot work on their fluency and expression.

7. Ideally, we want the children to self-correct their errors while reading. When your child is aware of his/her errors, and corrects them independently, be sure to praise your child--A LOT! Self-correction is one of the hardest skills for a child to acquire.