These Activities Can Strengthen Reading Skills
by Tom Livingston
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For More Info
• Child Development Institute, www.childdevelopmentinfo.com/ |
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“Talk to them,” says Paula Tallal, PhD. “There’s nothing more important you can do.”
As co-director of Rutgers University’s Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience in Newark, NJ, Dr. Tallal researches how we learn. “Today we can observe the brain while it’s processing information,” she says. As a founder of Scientific Learning Corp., based in Oakland, CA, Dr. Tallal has helped develop educational software that assists students learning to read or to become stronger readers.
Several Delaware Valley school districts use Scientific Learning’s Fast ForWord programs: Christina in Delaware; Cherry Hill, Clementon, Gloucester Twp., Haddon Twp., Lindenwold, Mantua, Medford Lakes, Moorestown and Vineland in New Jersey; and Lower Merion, Marple Newtown, Norristown, Philadelphia, Springfield and Tredyffrin East Town in Pennsylvania.
“The critical thing for both parents and teachers to understand is that you generally don’t have better reading comprehension than your comprehension of the spoken language,” says Dr. Tallal. “The brain really is built through environmental experiences. So the more a child is engaged in spoken conversation, the better his language skills will be, and this will give him the best foundation for understanding what he reads.”
Home Activities
Dr. Tallal recommends a set of activities you can do at home to help your child to develop and fine-tune the skills essential to reading and language fluency. The skills and activities include:
Phonemic awareness: the ability to hear, identify and manipulate the sounds of spoken language and to understand that words are made of sequences of phonemes, units of sound that make a difference in the meaning of words. (Dr. Tallal explains that two phonemes comprise the word “dog” — DAW and G.)
Students with phonemic awareness can judge whether two words rhyme and can isolate and substitute the beginning, middle and ending sounds in a word.
Teaching rhymes, songs and short poems and playing simple word games — such as “how many words can you rhyme with ‘sat’?” — help children develop phonemic awareness. “Kids like hearing things over and over,” says Dr. Tallal. “Read and talk to your baby. That helps the brain to hear these small sounds inside words, and it’s very
comforting.”
Phonics: the understanding that there is a predictable relationship between phonemes, the sounds of spoken language, and graphemes, the letters and spellings of written language.
You can help a younger child practice the alphabet by pointing out letters and teaching their name and use in other everyday words. Playing games — such as “how many words can you make using the letters in ‘spaghetti’?” — works well with older children.
“One of the best predictors of subsequent reading ability is being able to say the alphabet by age 4 or 5,” says Dr. Tallal. “We tend to teach children the names of letters, but it’s even more important for them to understand the sounds letters make.”
Fluency: the ability to read a text accurately and quickly. Fluent readers can recognize words automatically and understand their meaning.
In addition to reading to your child, encourage him to read aloud to you, even if he re-reads the same story several times. As you read to your child, have him follow along, looking at the words.
Children can practice fluency, says Dr. Tallal, once they’ve already “broken the code for reading, which is a very difficult code. Reading is becoming aware that words can be broken down into smaller sounds and that those sounds go with the letters.”
Processing: the ability to distinguish and associate individual speech sounds with their corresponding letter and word forms.
Listening games, such as identifying sounds in words that sound like something else — for example the “s” sounds like a hissing snake — help train the ear to capture and interpret sounds clearly.
Says Dr. Tallal, “One game that’s really important is being able to say a word and then extract a sound from it. If I say ‘plane’ without ‘p’ I get the word ‘lane.’ Without the ‘n’ I get the word ‘play.’ Pig Latin is a good way of manipulating sound. Or, you can have a series of blocks or letters. If this is the word ‘map,’ how would you change it to the word ‘nap,’ or the word ‘sap’? 3-year-olds won’t be able to do this but 7-year-olds should. If they can’t, they haven’t broken the reading code yet.”
Vocabulary: the words readers must know to communicate effectively.
You can help your child build a strong vocabulary by teaching her the meaning of important words and promoting the use of a dictionary. You can also teach her how to use context clues while reading to figure out unknown words and learn base words and affixes (prefixes and suffixes) to decode words.
“It has a lot to do with prefixes and suffixes,” says Dr. Tallal. “Words get built on top of a single word, like the base word ‘do,’ then adding a prefix like ‘un’ to make ‘undo’ or a suffix like ‘ing’ to make ‘doing.’ Once you know what ‘un’ means, you can put it in front of lots of words.”
Comprehension: the ability to derive meaning from text. Good readers have a purpose for reading, which is why it’s important to help your child find interesting books that he wants to read on his own.
Discussing what children are reading helps them read for meaning. Conversing with them helps build their understanding of words.
Says Dr. Tallal, “The more time parents talk with children, the greater the sheer number of words they hear, the more words kids are likely to understand.”
Memory: the ability to store information and ideas, essential for word recognition, understanding complex sentences and remembering instructions.
Engaging children in memory games such as concentration and encouraging them to re-tell stories help improve memory skills. So does asking a child what happened in school today. “If they don’t know how to organize their answers, talk about things that happened sequentially,” says Dr. Tallal. “This morning before school you did what? Once you got to school, what happened? What did you have for lunch?”
Attention: the ability to focus on information and tasks, while ignoring distractions. Fluent reading requires sustained and focused attention.
To increase attention span, you can have children set time goals for sticking to a task, such as doing homework or reading quietly, free from distractions such as TV. “If your child is moving from one activity to another, eliminate distractions. Reinforce the value of attention for a long period,” says Dr. Tallal.
Sequencing skills: used for maintaining order, such as the order of letters within words or words within a sentence.
Creating picture stories in which the order of the images is used to tell the story is an effective way to develop sequencing skills in young children. For those learning how to spell, mixing up letter tiles and having them unscramble the letters to form a word also helps.
“You can have the child draw pictures for a story as you’re reading it,” says Dr. Tallal, “pictures of things happening in the story. When you’ve finished, shuffle the pictures and have the child put them in order, perhaps as you re-read it.”
Never Too Late
“The final and perhaps most important thing that parents can do is to recognize that reading problems require intervention,” Dr. Tallal says. “Early intervention is important, but it’s never too late to help children become better readers.”
Reading specialists at your child’s school, learning centers and reading intervention software can all help. With today’s growing understanding of how kids learn, experts can pinpoint weak skills and reinforce them.
Tom Livingston is executive editor of MetroKids.