Learning Together: an Institut des troubles d’apprentissage initiative to teach children winning strategies to overcome difficulties in English and math. Discover our activities designed to help you better support your child’s academic success!
Did you know that children who can read fluently are especially well equipped to succeed at school? In fact, the ability to read well has been closely linked to academic success—but it’s a complex skill that requires the reader to use several strategies. Our sequence of 17 easy activities will introduce effective reading strategies to your child, so they can build strong reflexes and become a proficient reader!
They’re designed to fit easily into your family routine and to be done in order. They were created specifically to help children with learning difficulties, but all children can benefit from them!
You will need:
This activity introduces the 1st strategy: getting an overview. It will teach your child to prepare their reading by gathering visual and text-based clues before they start, giving them a general idea of what they’re about to read. Skimming a text is a bit like watching a movie trailer ahead of the screening!
This activity introduces a 2nd strategy: activating prior knowledge and reading with intention. Your child will be asked to reflect on what they know about the subject and why they’re reading this text. Knowing whether they’re reading for information or pleasure, for example, will help them focus on the important elements.
Introduce your child to a 3rd strategy: setting a goal. This activity introduces the K-W-L strategy, which will help your child identify what they want to learn by reading a text and help them stay focused on the important points as they read.
Now discover a 4th strategy: understanding words that replace others. Have your child find the pronouns in a text and identify who or what they refer to, for better reading comprehension.
This activity introduces another reading strategy: making links in a text. Texts contain all kinds of words that explain the links between ideas, sentences, and paragraphs; these are known as discourse markers and text organizers. Help your child learn to recognize them and gain a better understanding of the text.
This activity introduces a 6th strategy: making hypotheses about the meaning of new words. There are several ways to do this: Readers can look for another, smaller word within the unfamiliar word, or analyze what comes before and after it. Either approach will provide valuable clues to help them guess the meaning of a tricky word.
This activity introduces the 7th strategy: identifying the main ideas in a text. It will prompt your child to think about the central information and ideas in a text so they can summarize it or gain an overall understanding of what they’ve read.
This activity introduces an effective strategy: summarizing a paragraph. Pinpointing the main ideas of a shorter excerpt makes it easier to discuss the text and its important elements, and to remember what you’ve read.
The 9th reading strategy presented in this activity is visualizing the reading. Turning the text into a movie in your head and imagining the characters and places, you can better understand and memorize the elements of the reading.
This 10th strategy, asking questions to better understand, will prompt your child to ask themself questions as they read to check their knowledge and understanding. This type of self-reflection is easier than you might think; it’s all about making connections between new and prior knowledge, anticipating what will come next, and becoming aware of your reactions as you read.
Now discover an 11th strategy: understanding substitute words. Ask your child to search for words in the text that help avoid repetition, and to ask themself the right questions to discover their meaning.
In this activity, your child will practise identifying discourse markers. By paying close attention to these words, they’ll find links in the information provided and make sure they truly understand what they’re reading.
Do you know what it means to understand an inference? It means drawing a conclusion based on the available clues or information. Reading requires us to read between the lines, in other words, to understand certain things that aren’t clearly stated in the text. This activity will help your child master this new strategy.
This activity is a continuation of activity 13. Your child will use clues in the text and their own personal knowledge to make inferences and understand the meaning of a text.
Certain elements of a text will be interpreted differently from one reader to another. This is completely normal! In this activity, readers are asked to interpret a text and justify their interpretation based on their own knowledge and experience.
This activity invites your child to explore a 16th strategy: reacting to a text. It’s the perfect opportunity to express themself and share their thoughts on what they’ve read. Your role is to ask probing questions that will encourage them to develop their ideas and make connections with other texts they’ve read.
Great job! You’ve made it to the final activity in this sequence. This one focuses on reading appreciation. Your child will have to share their opinion on the reading and justify it. There’s no right or wrong answer here—the important thing is to be able to give valid reasons that support their opinion!
This sequence is part of a collection of tools and resources to help your child develop literacy and numeracy skills.
Check out our Learning Together collection to discover more activities to help your child as they learn to read, write, and do math.
Check out our other resources to help your child learn to read.
These activities were created by learning specialist Laurence Arcouette for Institut TA.