Cultivating Confident Readers

A common hurdle for parents and teachers alike is convincing kids to read. While there is the eternal challenge of finding an amazing book to get lost in (not to mention learning to get lost in a book!), video games and social media present intense competition for kids’ limited attention. Plus, it isn’t enough to just pick up a book and read the words in it! Today’s classrooms demand that students engage with text in more ways than ever, and that starts with strong comprehension. 

There are a number of tools and strategies that can help improve a child’s ability to comprehend text, but first, it’s important to make sure they actually enjoy reading. For a child who despises reading, whether that’s because it’s “too hard” or “boring”, there is hope! It just takes a little legwork. Help them find a book that sparks joy. It might take some digging, but there IS a book out there that will get him or her to fall in love with reading (or at least with that particular book...but we have to start somewhere.) Help your child discover what that genre is that they just won’t be able to put down, and find as much of it as you can. It might be graphic novels, cookbooks, magazines, instructional manuals...if it has text, let them read as much as they want! Then help them develop their comprehension skills with the tools and strategies below.

Supporting Young Readers

In the early grades (Kindergarten through around Fourth Grade), students need a balance of instruction in phonics, fluency, and comprehension. While these skills can be isolated in lessons or through homework activities, it is crucial for students to engage in multi-faceted reading instruction during these formative years. This starts at school, but there are many ways to supplement instruction through fun activities at home. 

• To help students who find decoding to be an obstacle, Scholastic has some creative ideas for making your own phonics games to reinforce this skill, and Homer is an amazing app to support early phonics learning. 

• To practice fluency, many kids love Reader’s Theater scripts, which are an excellent way to help your child bring characters to life by practicing vocal expression and changing intonation, an important part of fluency development. 

• If your child struggles with self-monitoring while reading--making many errors and not catching them--, see if they would be open to recording themselves while they read, so that they can hear how they sound as a reader. Most students love hearing their voices on tape (but some don’t)!

If your child struggles with understanding what he or she reads, here are 7 essential skills for building comprehension:

1. Previewing text - Skim pictures, look for keywords, think about what the book will be about based on the title/blurb on the back.

2. Asking questions - Ask who, what, when, where, and especially why and how questions before, during, and after reading

3. Making predictions - Use clues from the text to guess what will happen next

4. Making inferences - Use clues from the text to draw a logical conclusion about what is happening that is not stated in the text

5. Making connections - Relate the text to yourself (text-to-self connection), another book (text-to-text connection), or the world (text-to-world connection)

6. Summarizing the text - Put the important events and details into your own words

7. Evaluating the text - Look closely at how the author wrote the book, think about what you learned from this book, and what you will do with what you learned 

To make the most of their time reading, kids should be active readers. This means being engaged in the text, having a pencil in hand, asking and answering questions, re-reading for deeper meaning, and above all, reading books they love! To learn more about supporting early readers, check out our post on talking to kids about books and reading to learn.

Building Reading Skills in Secondary Grades

By Middle School, most students have mastered the skill of decoding, and can now focus all of their reading energy on building fluency and getting better at deciphering what the text means instead of what it says. For the former, the most important thing for kids to do is read, and read a lot! From books and comics to recipes and social media posts, the more kids practice their reading, the more fluency and vocabulary they’ll build. As for building their comprehension skills, active engagement with the text is key and purposeful annotations are the best tool for their reading toolbox! 

Students in upper grades should always have a pencil in hand for underlining, highlighting, and note-taking while they read. Here are our suggestions for how to use these tools most effectively.

• If a child struggles with figuring out what to highlight, it can help to use different colors to highlight for different foci such as important figures, themes, dates, and events.

• Students can write down questions, predictions, or connections to prior knowledge in the margins or in a graphic organizer. 

• They can write down connections between what they are reading and what they already knew about the topic. 

• Students can also look for things like text structure, which can help them determine what information is most important and what is more peripheral. 

• In order to navigate the new vocabulary they may come across, especially in content-specific texts, students should practice using context clues to try to determine the meaning of unknown words, then check their definition using a dictionary. 

• It can also help students to vocalize while they are reading; hearing their own voice speak the information out loud can help their brains more fully process that information. 

Ultimately, mastery of a text boils down to engagement; the more actively a reader engages with a text, the more he or she will get out of that reading. While so many kids see annotation as an annoying or distracting extra step in an already complicated process, it is important to explain that this extra step will become easier and more natural with practice, and will lead to immeasurable gains in learning. Not only will they gain a better understanding of what they read, they will also be able to more effectively and efficiently navigate that text to find the information they need to write their essay or build their study guide. Learn more about annotation strategies through our post on next level annotations!

Reading for Meaning

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By the time we reach middle and high school, what we learn is increasingly built on what we’ve learned before, reliant on the scaffolding of connections our brains have been constructing for us since we were crawling across colorful living-room carpets. But these connections, clusters of experience and information that help us make sense of the world, are still developing all the time — and the more that students can consciously access these categories of information and experience as they absorb new knowledge and master new tasks, the more confident and creative they will become. One of Smarten Up’s core messages to students is that learning itself is a learnable process: that the skill of being a student can be developed through a set of reflective habits and creative practices. 

Let’s consider the best habits for reading, a skill whose importance in the life of a student is hard to overstate. All of the work that students have done in elementary school to master the technical building blocks of reading fluency pays off as reading becomes a critical skill across disciplines, from biology to history, and from foreign languages to English literature. By this time, the decoding process has become more automatic, and students can put a larger share of their brainpower toward constructing meaning, analyzing connections, and processing information. While many of us remember ‘learning to read’ as young children, it is at this stage in our academic careers that we learn to read critically and deeply. 

There are concrete steps that will improve students’ ability to go past knowledge into understanding — this active reading checklist is a good place to start, with habits for before, during, and after reading. This is also where reflecting on the way we read different types of texts can be useful.  There is a clear difference between reading and writing poetry, and reading biographies of historical figures. Students should be able to approach each task with a strategy that fits its specific needs, while also recognizing the connections between distinct tasks and subject areas so that they’re not reinventing the wheel every time they approach a reading or writing assignment. One starting place is to ask: How does this content relate to what I already know? Or: how does this assignment resemble other tasks I’ve tackled in the past?

When students consider these questions, they activate prior knowledge that will shape how they understand the new content. Students should also consider, as they read, other connections they can activate to enrich the perspective they’re bringing to the text, and make the information stickier in their memory. Consider text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections. How does Hamlet’s relationship with his uncle compare to the bonds in your own extended family? Hopefully, not too closely! Can you think of any links to the often melodramatic history of royal households in medieval Europe, or the family politics in your favorite television series? What songs would you put on a moody Hamlet playlist? Ultimately, the takeaway is simple: the more that we bring with us to the reading process, the more we get out of it.

Learning to Read

As children learn to read, the world around them takes on a whole new dimension; signs become meaningful, directions become more clear, and stories and books offer an entirely new world of fantasy, adventure, and discovery. While your child will certainly receive great instruction in school, there are tons of fun and simple ways to reinforce those lessons at home and on the go. Below you will find an overview of how great reading skills develop, and our favorite tools for supporting literacy growth.

The first building block of reading is phonemic awareness, which is a child's ability to hear and identify the sounds in spoken words.  This is a skill that can easily be developed on-the-go as you shuffle your child around the city by challenging her to think of rhyming words, or by playing I Spy with beginning or ending sounds (I spy with my little eye something that begins with a /d/ sound). 

Once your child is able to hear these individual phonemes (which is just a fancy word for sounds), she can begin to learn learn the letters that go with each one. This predictable sound-symbol association is called phonics. While this word is often synonymous with dull and repetitive exercises, it doesn't have to be. With hands-on games such as Alphabet Go Fish and Alphabet Bingo, you can spend quality time with your child and help her learn letter names and sounds. Digital resources also offer the opportunity for engaging independent practice, and the best of them allow you to monitor your child's progress as well. Some of our favorite phonics apps include Learn with Homer, Phonics Island, and Letter School, which also targets handwriting skills.

After these foundations have been laid, it will be time for your child to work on developing her fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. The first is a question of practice makes perfect. The more your child reads, the better she will be able to quickly identify words; and the more your child hears a fluent reader model how to read with expression (pausing at punctuation, showing excitement at exclamation marks, etc.) the better she will learn to do this herself. The last two building blocks of literacy will develop as a result of talking with your child about books. It is important to not only ask about who, where and what is involved in a chapter or story, but to also think about bigger picture concepts and connections that can be made. What motivates a character? What are some of the problems or challenges she faced? How did she overcome them? How was the book similar or different to your child's real-life experiences? 

Most importantly, though, reading should be fun. The more you, as a parent, are able to express and share excitement and enthusiasm for stories and books, the more likely your child is to embrace the exciting possibilities of written language!