Back when I discussed positive reinforcement I was trying to make a point that a positive attitude and words of encouragement can go a long way in giving your child confidence. This confidence, of course, is going to go beyond their reading skills and help them become confident individuals as a whole. This might seem old fashioned, but something that teachers used to do back in the day should be carried on as a motivational tool and form of positive reinforcement: putting gold stars on their work!

Kids love stickers in general, but a star is representative of achievement. They are reaching for the stars in the academic world! Please reward them for all their hard work! The perfect time to do this is after they’ve written their ‘books’ of phonograms (short vowel words and long vowel words for example). When you make the cover, add a shiny star to show them how proud you are of their hard work J Try to stick with stars or ‘words of encouragement’ stickers ( ex: “Awesome!” “Great Job!”) and stay away from cartoon characters and other images that might distract them from the book itself.

Remember those picture cards you used early on with your child to teach them letter recognition? The ones with a letter on one side and a corresponding picture on the other… When you first used these you were teaching the sounds of the letter rather than the names. At this point in your child’s reading lessons, however, you are going to want to start testing whether they know the names of the letters as well as the sounds.

Go through the cards with your child and first have them tell you the sounds of the letters. When you finish, tell them that this time you want them to tell you the names of the letters instead of the sounds. You might notice that it takes a while for there to be a smooth transition between the sounds and the names of letters, but that’s okay. The more you practice with your child, the better it will get! Some common trip-ups happen with distinguishing the names and sounds of ‘b’,‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘q’, but that’s totally normal.

Just remember that practice makes perfect (and practice is a lot easier with visual references)!

We always want to challenge our kids to have the greatest understanding possible in all of their lessons, –especially in reading lessons. Any way you can strengthen their skills is a plus and today I have a fun idea for you to try to do just that! The game is called “Rhyme-time” and the way you play is:

1)      Choose a word ending such as “-at” (if you are working on short vowels for example)

2)      Tell your child that you are both going to come up with words that end in “-at”. Explain that because the words sound alike, they rhyme.

3)      Start making up words: bat, cat, fat, rat, sat, mat, pat, hat, etc.

4)      Have your child repeat the words with you and ask if they can hear how they sound alike.

5)      To take the game to the next level, challenge your child to see who can make up the most rhyming words!

Go through this game with all the short vowels and then move on to long vowels. Something to remember is once you get to long vowels you should point out that just because the words rhyme doesn’t mean that they are spelled similarly. For example, ‘rain’ and ‘lane’ rhyme but they display two different long vowel lessons: ‘ai’ makes the long ‘a’ sound and the ‘e’ makes the ‘a’ say its name.

Here’s a rule to share with your children early on in their reading lessons: "Whenever you see a word with ‘Q’, a ‘U’ is sure to follow" J Words with ‘QU’ are reasonably plentiful so it’s worth it to point out the rule and even do a word building exercise with a movable alphabet to give your child a visual.

This is a more advanced lesson and I’d suggest introducing it sometime when they’re in the long vowel sequence of lessons. Make sure you use words that start with ‘QU’ and words that have “QU’ within the word. Some words you can use include: queen, sequin, quest, request, and quake.

Have any more quick reading rules to share with inquiring parents and teachers? Please post below!

We’ve talked about many ways you can reinforce your child’s reading skills lately, but one technique I want to highlight is role-reversal. The way to really tell that your child has a mastery of whatever reading lesson you happen to be working on is to have them give the lesson back to you. Tell them that you want them to be the teacher and show you the lesson you were working on just like you had shown them.

The easiest lessons to do that with include working with the movable alphabet, hands on games like the ‘mystery box’, and a lesson called ‘The Ladder” which I’ll be discussing later this week…

Make sure when they are teaching you that they are able to explain the phonics rule(s) and show you examples of how the rule(s) works. When they can demonstrate this, you know they’ve got it down and can move on to the lesson!