At Home Tips
Ways to support your child's literacy development at home:
Innovative home-literacy activities:
Activities to support Reading Comprehension- Comprehension for a 6th grade reader involves understanding text and ideas on many levels. He/she is expected to think about and reflect on math, science, and history texts. Help your child understand what they're reading by using these strategies:
Activities to support Comprehension- Beyond the text
Reading involves a variety of genres and techniques that cover complex historical fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and online texts. Many of the techniques involve a careful review of story and author approaches. Support your 6th grader by suggesting he/she read a variety of genres independently, and to think further about story-lines with these tips:
Activities to support Word Recognition - Fluency
Activities to support Word Recognition: Decoding Skills
Activities to support Vocabulary Knowledge
Words and their meaning are cornerstones in reading. Your child learns new key vocabulary words in every subject area of school, so keep plenty of dictionaries and thesauruses on hand. Here are more tips to help your sixth grade reader get used to new words:
Good reading websites:
www. textproject.org
Good writing websites:
www.storyjumper.com
This awesome website allows students to create and publish a written piece using a digital storybook. This is a great way to have the students bring their writing pieces to life at home! You can even purchase a hard-covered version of their storybook!
Good Researcher's websites:
www.kidshealth.org
www.discoveryeducation.com
www.kids.nationalgeographic.com
www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/
Keyboarding Websites
Reference: Tompkins, G. E. (2010). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Ways to support your child's literacy development at home:
- Reading aloud to your child
- Listening to your child read aloud and reading along with them
- Talking with your child about the book they are reading
- Ask your child what strategies they learned in school
- Having your child write at home
- Emphasizing the value of literacy and the importance of school success
Innovative home-literacy activities:
- Interactive Read Alouds- Read a book a loud to your child. Boost your child's engagement by asking questions, making predictions, and talking about the illustrations. Families could even use puppets, draw pictures, and role play to promote children's responses.
- Family Book Clubs- Your family could read and discuss books together and sometimes could invite other families to join the book club. Families choose a book that interests them that everyone will read and discuss. After the family finishes the book, everyone gets together and talks about the book.
- Family Journals- Families can write back and forth in special family journals. At school, children write entries, explaining what is going on in their classroom and what they're learning, and then they take their journals home to share with their parents. Next, families can write back, commenting on their child's entries, asking questions, and offering praise and encouragement.
- Family Literacy Portfolios- Parents can save samples of their child's reading and writing and collect them in large folders or portfolios, and they they can share the portfolios with the teacher. Samples of your child's reading and writing can include drawings with captions, notes, stories and poems, handmade birthday cards, and photocopies of the covers of favorite books.
Activities to support Reading Comprehension- Comprehension for a 6th grade reader involves understanding text and ideas on many levels. He/she is expected to think about and reflect on math, science, and history texts. Help your child understand what they're reading by using these strategies:
- Help your child choose a book to review. It can be a novel he is reading for fun or a book that was assigned for school. Turn the book review into a "book talk", by having the family read the book individually and then have a group discussion.
- Lead a guided preview of your child's textbook. Ask your student to look for ways that the author has structured the text to guide a reader's meaning. Point out the title and any headings and subheadings that are used. Conduct a "think-aloud" discussion with your child to model strategies appropriate for reading a text. Share your thoughts or any questions the text raises and point out key ideas that would be important to remember
- Discuss what your child already knows about the subject.
- Have him/her explain whether or not text makes sense; this is called “monitoring understanding”.
- Encourage re-reading to help clarify understanding.
- Suggest he/she write down main ideas and supporting details of each paragraph.
- Have him/her write down questions or ask them aloud during reading.
Activities to support Comprehension- Beyond the text
Reading involves a variety of genres and techniques that cover complex historical fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and online texts. Many of the techniques involve a careful review of story and author approaches. Support your 6th grader by suggesting he/she read a variety of genres independently, and to think further about story-lines with these tips:
- Ask questions about his/her reading like “what problem did the main character overcome"?
- Ask him/her to visualize and then describe what’s happening in the text.
- Have him/her make predictions about what might happen next, even predictions about what happens after the end.
- Have a discussion comparing styles of different authors. Ask him/her about the way each writer describes settings or uses dialogue.
Activities to support Word Recognition - Fluency
- Texts that contain longer words with two or more syllables can be difficult to read for some students. Identifying prefixes, word endings, and root words can help students read the word. Help your student figure out a longer word’s pronunciation by: 1) breaking the word into smaller parts or chunks, 2) reading the parts separately, and then 3) reading the entire word.
- Introduce poetry to your child to build confidence in reading. Encourage your child to practice reading with expression.
Activities to support Word Recognition: Decoding Skills
- Play a game with your child. Challenge him/her to find words with several syllables in his textbooks. Have your student make a list of words he/she finds while reading. Once he/she has recorded the words, ask them to break them down into syllables. Assign a point to each syllable (e.g., harmonica = 4 points). You can do the same with words you find while reading. At the end of the day or week, see who has the most points. In addition, make sure that your child is able to define any words on their list. Encourage him/her to use the dictionary and create a definition using his own words.
- Show your student how to break multi-syllabic words into recognizable parts. At times, it can be difficult read words that are long and unfamiliar. Encourage him/her to slow down when reading and to sound out each part of the word and then blend them together.
Activities to support Vocabulary Knowledge
Words and their meaning are cornerstones in reading. Your child learns new key vocabulary words in every subject area of school, so keep plenty of dictionaries and thesauruses on hand. Here are more tips to help your sixth grade reader get used to new words:
- Have him/her create flashcards with a new word on the front of the card and its definition on the back, and make a game out of using them.
- Use the new words as often as you can in everyday life to guarantee exposure.
- Have your child write down unfamiliar words on sticky notes during family reading time and look them up later.
- Spend quiet time reading as a family, with no distractions from television, computers, phones, etc. Reading magazines, newspapers, fiction, and non-fiction aloud with your child is a great way to increase his/her oral vocabulary. Let your child see you reading for pleasure and give your reactions to things you read and encourage your child to do likewise.
- Check with your child to determine what subject area vocabulary they need to study each week. If he/she has difficulty remembering these words, encourage them to make flashcards, then help them practice. When they do not understand a word they are reading, ask him/her to read the entire sentence to look for clues to the word's meaning. If he/she is still confused, suggest that they read the sentences before and after the one containing the unfamiliar word. Next, your child can look the word up in a dictionary or looking the word up in a dictionary app.
Good reading websites:
www. textproject.org
Good writing websites:
www.storyjumper.com
This awesome website allows students to create and publish a written piece using a digital storybook. This is a great way to have the students bring their writing pieces to life at home! You can even purchase a hard-covered version of their storybook!
Good Researcher's websites:
www.kidshealth.org
www.discoveryeducation.com
www.kids.nationalgeographic.com
www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/
Keyboarding Websites
- http://www.learninggamesforkids.com/keyboarding_games.html
Reference: Tompkins, G. E. (2010). Literacy for the 21st century: A balanced approach (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.