2nd grade

Learning to be a successful and engaged reader doesn't only happen at school. Reading at home is a key component to your student's reading success. The following passages explain different aspects of reading and provide tips for what for what you can do at home with your student to improve his/her reading.

Decoding: What’s That Word?

Decoding is a crucial component of literacy. Decoding during reading means figuring out unfamiliar words in a text. If students cannot decode quickly and successfully, they end up focusing their energy on discerning individual words, not comprehensively understanding what they read. Here are some strategies you can use at home to help your students be successful decoders.

Source: ReadingRockets.com

Focus on the meaning

Young readers often figure out a new word by thinking about what would make sense in a sentence or story. You can help by suggesting that your child look at the pictures, then read a sentence again. If your child's guess at a word is incorrect, ask questions such as, "Does that make sense? What did the girl do at the last house she visited?"

Relate sounds to letters

Children apply what they already know about the relationships between letters and sounds to read a new word. For example, a child can read the word train, because she knows the tr in this word makes the same sound as the tr at the beginning of truck, a word she already knows. You can help by reminding your child what he or she already knows about letter-sound relationships and helping him/her use this knowledge to attack new words.

Look at how words and phrases are formed

Compound words are formed by combining two words (e.g., playground). You can help your child read an unfamiliar compound word by demonstrating how to break it down into its parts. "That was a good guess – raincoat. You recognized the first part of the word, rain. But look at the second part of the word again. I'll cover the first part. Now, what does the second part say? That's right, it's bow. So what is the word? Yay! You got it, it's rainbow. Now the story makes more sense. After the rain, she saw a rainbow, not a raincoat."

Recognize sight words

High-frequency sight words make up about 50 percent of the words we read and often cause children problems. When a child masters high frequency sight words he/she experiences success which can boost his/her self-confidence and interest in reading. You can help children make flash cards for sight words to use at home. You and your child can celebrate and track progress in mastering sight words by recording them in a journal, making a paper chain, or adding "sight word leaves" to a tree. See me for a list of the most common high-frequency words.

Use multiple cues

When reading with your child you can model how to use several decoding systems at one time as problem solving strategies for determining how to read an unfamiliar word. This process encourages your child to think about what might make sense in the sentence. "What would fit here? The sentence begins, I put cr, then I see the word soup. But what might she put in the soup that begins with cr. Oh, I know. It must be crackers. The girl put crackers in her soup."

The Reason for Reading:

Reading Comprehension

In the last newsletter, I discussed different decoding strategies, or ways for students to figure out unfamiliar words. Decoding is a key step to being a successful reader. It serves as building block for the primary reason for reading: reading comprehension. Often young readers believe that being able to read the words means they are reading. That is not enough. I tell students all the time that reading is more than knowing the words on the page. Reading is about understanding. To comprehend what we read, we need to be thinking as we read. Here are some questions you can have your student ask him/herself when he/she reads each night. They would make great flashcards. The green questions are questions students ask before they start reading. These questions help activate prior knowledge. The yellow questions are questions students should ask while they are reading. The red questions are those that students should ask themselves after they finish reading. There are different types of questions for different types of texts. The first questions listed are for narrative stories (fiction). The second set of questions is for expository texts (nonfiction).

Narrative

Green

· What does the title tell me about this story?

· What do the pictures tell me?

· What do I already know about...?

· I predict this story will be about...?

Yellow

· Who...?

· What...?

· When...?

· Where...?

· Why...?

· How...?

· What do I think will happen next?

· It would be exciting/ interesting if....

Red

· Who were the characters?

· What was the setting?

· What was the problem?

· How was the problem solved?

· Why did...?

· I liked/disliked this story because...

· What do you think happened to the characters after the story ended?

Expository

Green

· What does the title tell me?

· What do I already know about the topic?

· What do the pictures tell me?

· What do I want to learn about...?

Yellow

· Does this make sense?

· What have I learned so far?

· What questions do I still have about the topic?

Red

· What new words did I learn?

· What is the passage mainly about?

· What did I learn about...?

· What else do I want to know about...?

Source: Florida Center for Reading Research