How Children Read Books

I teach our first graders that there are three ways to read. You can "pretend read" by telling the story of a familiar story book. You can "picture read" by looking at a book about real things with lots of pictures and talking about all the things you see in the pictures. And you can read by reading all the words. Early in the year, I model all types of reading and look at books and decide how children at their age would probably read the book.

"Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a book you could pretend read because you know the story so well. Let's practice how you might pretend read it if you choose it for self selected reading time."

"How would you read this book about the zoo? It's got lots and lots of words in little tiny print but you could read it by picture reading. Let's practice picture reading."

"Now, here is an alphabet book. You see just one word and it goes with the picture. You can probably read this book by reading the words."

Once children know that there are three ways to read books, no child ever says, "I can't read yet!"

What can you do when your child is stuck on a tricky word?

We will be using the following decoding strategies in our classroom. You might want to try them at home when your child is stuck on a tricky word.

Tell your child to look at the picture. You may tell your child the word is something that can be seen in the picture, if that is the case.

Tell your child to look for chunks in the word, such as it in sit, at in mat, or and and ing in standing.

Ask your child to get his/her mouth ready to say the word by shaping the mouth for the beginning letter.

Ask your child if the word looks like another word s/he knows. For example, does bed look like red?

Ask your child to go on and read to the end of the sentence. Often by reading the other words in context, your child can figure out the unknown word.

If your child says the wrong word while reading, ask questions like:
Does it make sense?
Does it sound right?
Does it look right?

The Absolute BEST Way to Help Your Child Learn to Read:

READ, READ, READ to your child!