Home Reading Strategies to Use When Reading with Your Child

Home Reading Strategies

As we discussed at conferences,  grade four students must read every day.  Part of this reading involves reading with an adult and discussing the text as you are reading together. All good/strategic readers use these strategies (visualize, discuss main idea, make connections, ask questions and make inferences, they transform their thinking and understand how characters change in a story).  Even if it is just 5-10 minutes per evening this thinking together will boost your child's understanding of the text significantly. 

Listed below are some helpful steps to take to open up a thinking conversation:   

Here are some steps to help guide you through home reading:

1. Look at the cover and the title of the book together. Make a prediction/inference
about what the book will be about.
2. Turn the title into a question. For example: Fall Leaves. Turn this into Why do Leaves
Fall off trees?
3. Keep this question in mind as you read the book together at the end see if your question
is answered as you read.
4. Now, do a picture walk through the book. Take a quick flip through the pictures. How
do these pictures connect to your prediction/inference?
Now your child begins to read the book out loud to you.
As they are reading prompt them to stop at different points (every few minutes) to:
Visualize (discuss the pictures you are seeing in your head while you read).
Connect (what does it remind you of? Text to self (something you have done), Text to text
(another book or movie you have read or seen), or Text to World (something happening in the
world).
Ask Questions (what questions does the story make you ask?)
Stop to make an inference (a maybe statement. What do you think might happen? Why might
a character be acting a certain way? Maybe it's because ... )

Here is a link to a really informative video by Adrienne Gear, author of Non-Fiction Writing Powers.  She speaks very clearly about the connections between reading and writing.  As we discussed at conferences.  Writing is a focus for grade four and a school wide literacy goal.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlOvKOrF21Y