This article was written by Camryn Yi of Richard Montgomery High School
Reading books: Anyone can remember a time where they loved to read books, whether it's the bedtime stories parents would read, or the cute, small picture books picked out from the library. Everyone encourages young people—especially children—to read books throughout their growing and developing years. There are many effective reading strategies young people and children can use to help improve their reading comprehension.
What strategies can parents use to help encourage their children to read more?
For growing readers, it is important to develop strong reading comprehension skills. As children grow, their reading comprehension skills help them not only understand school books like textbooks and complex English books, but also day-to-day literacy like online news articles.
For parents, helping to create a strong foundation of reading comprehension skills and encouraging their children to read is necessary to help their growing reader. According to Scholastic, rereading books can help children more fluently, which means reading quicker and smoother. There are many ways parents can use the rereading method to help their children. One way is for parents to reread their kids’ books to them. Not only does this provide family bonding between the parent and the child, but it also helps children understand the story more. Through this method, they are able to pick up new information, find deeper meaning from the text, and make connections from the book to themselves and other books they have read.
In addition, when children reread books they like, it helps them pass the time while trying to find the next book they want to read. According to Scholastic, their report, The Scholastic Kids and Family Reading Report have found as kids get older 41 percent of them struggle choosing and finding books they enjoy. Finding a new book can be difficult, especially for a young child. By rereading their favorite book, they are able to still enjoy reading and develop a love for it while also improving their reading comprehension and fluency. When building fluency, new independent readers need to practice often in order to improve their reading from choppy and slow to fast and fluent. By choosing a book they enjoy, they are able to practice often by rereading the book multiple times, building their fluency.
What is the Best Reading Strategy?
There are many different reading strategies each with their own benefit. According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the best method is for the child to read aloud to learn to read and strengthen their comprehension.
According to NICHD, the best approaches for reading instruction is to use systematic phonics, clear instructions in phonemic awareness, methods to improve fluency, and ways to enhance comprehension. What do phonemic awareness or systematic phonics mean? According to the University of Oregon, systematic phonics is the use of the relationship between sounds and symbols to help recognize words. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and understand the sounds in spoken syllables. Methods to improve fluency include the previously mentioned rereading strategy.
In addition, according to Reading Horizons, neurological studies comparing the functions of good readers, struggling readers and readers with print-based disabilities show that the brains of those with dyslexia have a harder time processing language and require more specific reading strategies. The best approach to help struggling readers is structured literacy, which consists of multiple different components. Structured literacy includes sound structure, phonics, syllables, morphology, syntax, and semantics. This approach can help readers develop stronger reading comprehension. It has shown to be very effective with struggling readers and those who have dyslexia and other print-based disablilites.
Conclusion
In conclusion, when choosing a reading strategy that best fits for your child, you should try many different strategies with them and see which works best for them. However, if you're stuck and need help deciding, choosing an auditory strategy is the best to help your child become a more fluent reader. Additionally, you should help your child while they develop their reading comprehension and practice becoming more fluent. Overall, these reading strategies not only help children grow as readers, but also support family bonding and help kids develop a love for reading.
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