At Home Reading Activity- Improve English Reading Skill In Kids
Most of our kids struggle to read and write English lessons once they are in grade 1. English reading skills in kids are very important and need to be improved in early stages. Many parents comment me saying how to improve English reading skill in kids.
Before telling what you can do or how can you help you kid or student I want you to understand that it is a very common problem.
Common because kids in UKG or PP2 learn blending and small sentences and as they reach grade 1 you see English in almost all subjects be it EVS, Computers, GK, even in Maths they have to read questions. Since there is drastic change in their curriculum and huge English reading is involved you will find almost all kids struggling to read.
Now lets see what as a parent or teacher you can do.
Have the phonics list to quickly revise all the blending and sounds in English that would help in reading.
What you have to do is to revise and make the kids understand these sounds and ask them to apply them while reading. Reading any English word would need
understanding of blendings that kids learn in their PP2.
So to start from make sure kids have proper knowledge of blendings bl, cl, fl, gl,pl, br, cr, dr, fr, gr, pr, ss, ll. Apart from this digraphs , r controlled vowels, long vowel sounds, vowel pairs are also important. If you have no idea what I am talking about you can anytime visit my YouTube channel and see videos explaining different blending sounds.
Click here to download the At Home Reading Activity Phonics List with example words.pdf
Teaching Sight Words
Next very important thing that you cannot ignore are the sight words. Sight words help tremendously in improving english reading skills. Sight words are small words that appear many times and most of them cannot be read using phonics. So memorizing them will help. Sight words : and, it, he , she, to, all, many,the etc.
So imagine your kid is reading English lesson from his text book and he already know all these sight words. It will definitely increase his confidence. The other bigger words he should try using all the phonic strategies that he knows.
In “At Home Reading Activity ” make your kids or student read 2 -3 paragraphs daily . Each paragraph should be read 3 time. each time when they are reading you will notice the change in fluency.
In First turn, they can read sight words and for bigger words try blending of phonics or take your help. What is not allowed is to spell the word and then pronouncing it. Any word should be read only using phonic sounds but not the letter names.
Doing this activity daily will help kids learn to read English confidently even if they don’t know any new word which they are reading for the first time.
