Teaching a child to read can feel like an enormous responsibility, and it’s easy to feel lost in a sea of conflicting advice. The good news is that decades of research have given us a clear, reliable map to follow. The Science of Reading cuts through the noise, showing us that all successful readers master five core skills. This post is your practical guide to that map. We’re moving beyond the theory to give you a toolkit of engaging, effective science of reading activities you can use today. Whether you’re in a classroom or at your kitchen table, these strategies will help you systematically build each essential skill, giving your learners a solid foundation for a lifetime of reading success.
Key Takeaways
- Master the Five Pillars of Reading: True literacy is built on five key skills: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Teaching these components systematically removes the guesswork and provides a clear, research-backed path for every learner.
- Engage Multiple Senses for Deeper Learning: Make abstract reading concepts concrete by using multisensory activities. When students see a letter, say its sound, and trace its shape, they build stronger, more lasting connections that are especially helpful for children with learning differences.
- Use Assessment to Personalize Instruction: Regularly check in on your student’s progress with quick, informal assessments. This data shows you exactly what to focus on next, allowing you to adapt activities and provide the targeted support each child needs to move forward confidently.
What Are the 5 Core Components of Reading?
When we talk about teaching a child to read, it can feel like a huge, abstract goal. Where do you even begin? Thankfully, decades of research have given us a clear map. The Science of Reading breaks down this complex process into five essential, teachable skills. I like to think of these as the foundational pillars that hold up the entire structure of literacy. When we focus on these five core components, we shift from simply hoping a child learns to read to intentionally giving them a step-by-step path to get there.
This research-backed framework removes the guesswork and provides a reliable guide for instruction, whether you’re a teacher managing a full classroom or a parent working one-on-one at the kitchen table. It’s about being systematic and explicit. Understanding these components is the first step toward building an effective reading program that truly supports every learner. Each skill builds on the last, creating a strong, interconnected foundation for a lifetime of reading success. By mastering these pillars, children gain the confidence and ability to not just decode words, but to understand and connect with the world through text.
What Each Component Means
To teach reading effectively, we need to know exactly what skills we’re building. The five core components give us a clear roadmap. Here’s what each one means:
- Phonemic Awareness: This is all about sound. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and play with the individual sounds, or phonemes, in spoken words. It’s an auditory skill that comes before a child even looks at letters.
- Phonics: This component connects sounds to letters. Phonics involves understanding the relationship between letters and the sounds they make. This essential skill, known as decoding, is what allows a child to sound out and read words correctly.
- Fluency: This is the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. Fluent readers don’t have to stop and decode every single word, which frees up their mental energy to focus on what the text actually means.
- Vocabulary: This refers to the words a student knows and understands. A strong vocabulary is absolutely crucial for making sense of a text. If a child doesn’t know what the words mean, they can’t comprehend the message.
- Comprehension: This is the ultimate goal of reading—to understand and interpret the text. True comprehension is the result of all the other components working together seamlessly.
Why Each Component Matters
Focusing on these five components isn’t just a good idea—it’s what the research shows works. In fact, studies suggest that 95 out of 100 students can learn to read when they receive clear and organized teaching of these foundational skills. When we teach reading as a set of distinct but related skills, we make it accessible to all learners, including those with dyslexia and other learning differences. Instead of leaving reading to chance, this approach gives us a concrete plan to follow. It empowers us as educators and parents to identify exactly where a child is struggling and provide the targeted support they need to move forward and become confident, capable readers.
How the Components Work Together
None of these components exists in a vacuum. The Science of Reading shows that all five must work together for a student to become a proficient reader. Think of it like a puzzle—you need all the pieces to see the full picture. Phonemic awareness lays the groundwork for phonics. Strong phonics skills lead to better fluency. And when a child can read fluently and has a rich vocabulary, they can finally achieve deep comprehension. Each component directly supports the others, creating a powerful synergy. This is why a structured literacy approach is so effective; it systematically and explicitly teaches each component, ensuring no piece of the puzzle is missing.
Activities for Phonemic Awareness
Before a child can learn to read print, they need to be able to hear and play with the sounds in spoken language. This is phonemic awareness, and it’s a purely auditory skill that serves as the bedrock for literacy. It’s about training the ear to hear the individual sounds, or phonemes, that make up words. Think of it as pre-reading—the essential groundwork laid before you ever introduce letters. According to the Science of Reading, a strong foundation in phonemic awareness is one of the greatest predictors of future reading success.
The great news is that teaching these skills doesn’t require complex materials or hours of prep. The most effective phonemic awareness activities are simple, engaging, and can be woven into your day in just a few minutes. These games and exercises help children learn to isolate sounds, blend them together, break them apart, and manipulate them to create new words. Below are some practical, fun, and powerful activities you can start using right away to build this critical skill with your learners.
Play Sound Recognition Games
The first step in phonemic awareness is helping children recognize that words are made up of smaller sounds. Sound recognition games are perfect for this because they’re playful and intuitive. Start with a simple game of “I Spy,” but focus on sounds instead of colors. You could say, “I spy with my little eye something that starts with the sound /m/.” This encourages children to listen for the initial sound in words around them.
Another great activity is a sound hunt. Give your student a target sound, like /s/, and have them find objects in the room that start with that sound (e.g., scissors, sock, sun). These games help students develop auditory discrimination, training their ears to isolate specific sounds within the stream of speech. You can use our Alphabet Books to provide a visual anchor for each sound as they master it.
Practice Blending and Segmenting
Blending and segmenting are two sides of the same coin and are absolutely essential for reading and spelling. Blending is the process of pushing sounds together to form a word. You can practice this by saying sounds slowly and having the child say the word. For example, “What word do these sounds make? /f/ /i/ /sh/.” The child should respond, “fish!”
Segmenting is the opposite skill: breaking a word apart into its individual sounds. Ask your student, “How many sounds do you hear in the word ‘hop’?” and guide them to say “/h/ /o/ /p/,” holding up a finger for each sound. Using manipulatives like blocks or tokens can make this tangible. These skills are central to any structured literacy approach because they directly connect the sounds students hear to the letters they will eventually read and write.
Try Rhyming Activities
Rhyming is a fun and powerful way to develop phonemic awareness. When children play with rhymes, they learn to pay attention to the sounds within words, particularly the ending sounds. Start by reading rhyming books and poems aloud, emphasizing the rhyming words. You can pause before a rhyming word and let your student fill in the blank, which makes reading interactive and fun.
You can also play simple rhyming games. Say a word like “cat” and ask your child to name other words that rhyme with it, like “hat,” “mat,” and “sat.” Another game is “Odd One Out,” where you say three words (e.g., “log, dog, pin”) and ask the child which one doesn’t belong. Activities like these help children recognize word families and patterns, which makes it easier for them to decode new words when they begin reading our Little Lions Decodable Books.
How to Assess Phonemic Awareness
How do you know if your instruction is working? Regular, informal assessment is key. This doesn’t mean you need to give a formal test. Instead, you can check for understanding through the same games you use for practice. During an activity, simply ask a question that reveals their skill level. For example, “Can you tell me the first sound in ‘dinosaur’?” or “What word is left if I take the /s/ sound away from ‘stop’?”
These quick check-ins give you valuable information about what a student has mastered and where they might need more support. Perhaps a child is great at rhyming but struggles to segment words with four sounds. This insight allows you to tailor your instruction to meet their specific needs. A comprehensive homeschool curriculum will include these progress-monitoring opportunities to help you ensure your child is on the right track.
Activities for Phonics
Once a child can hear the individual sounds in words (phonemic awareness), the next step is connecting those sounds to written letters. This is phonics, and it’s the key that unlocks the written code of our language. Phonics instruction teaches students the predictable relationships between letters and sounds, empowering them to decode, or sound out, words they’ve never seen before. A systematic approach is essential here, meaning you introduce letter-sound relationships in a logical, carefully planned sequence. The following activities will help your students build a strong phonics foundation, turning them into confident, capable decoders.
Master Letter-Sound Correspondence
The heart of phonics is knowing that the letter ‘b’ makes the /b/ sound or that ‘sh’ makes the /sh/ sound. This is letter-sound correspondence, and mastering it is non-negotiable for learning to read. Explicit and systematic instruction is the most effective way to teach these connections. You can use simple flashcards for a quick drill, play matching games with letter and picture cards, or try sound mapping, where students connect sounds in a word to the letters that represent them. The goal is to make these connections automatic. An Orton-Gillingham approach excels at this by introducing concepts methodically, ensuring students truly master one skill before moving to the next.
Build Words with Fun Exercises
After learning a few letter-sound connections, it’s time for students to become word builders. Using this knowledge to construct words makes the learning tangible and reinforces their skills in a hands-on way. Give students magnetic letters, letter tiles, or even letter cards and ask them to build simple words you say aloud. You can also make it a game by scrambling the letters of a word and having them unscramble it. These exercises help students practice blending sounds together to read a word and segmenting words into sounds to spell them. These activities are like a workout for their reading muscles, strengthening their ability to decode and encode.
Practice with Decodable Texts
Decodable texts are a student’s training ground for applying their phonics skills. These books and passages are specially written using only the letter-sound patterns your student has already been taught, along with a few high-frequency words. This targeted practice is incredibly powerful. Instead of guessing, students can successfully sound out the words, which builds immense confidence and reinforces their learning. Using decodable books allows students to experience real reading success, showing them that the phonics rules they are learning actually work. This practice is what moves phonics knowledge from a set of abstract rules to a functional reading tool.
How to Monitor Phonics Progress
How do you know if your phonics instruction is working? You have to check in on your students’ progress regularly. This doesn’t need to be a formal, stressful test. It can be as simple as listening to a student read a short list of words containing the phonics pattern you just taught. You can also observe them during word-building activities to see if they can correctly match letters to sounds. These quick, informal assessments provide crucial data. They show you which students are ready to move on and which might need more review. This monitoring is a core part of structured literacy and allows you to tailor your instruction to meet each child’s needs, ensuring everyone is on the path to reading success.
How to Build Reading Fluency and Vocabulary
Once a child can decode words, the next step is to build fluency and vocabulary. Reading fluency is the ability to read with speed, accuracy, and proper expression. When a student reads fluently, they don’t have to stop and decode every word. This frees up their mental energy to focus on what the text actually means. Vocabulary, or the knowledge of word meanings, is the other side of this coin. A student can read a sentence perfectly, but it won’t mean much if they don’t know what the words mean.
According to the Science of Reading, fluency and vocabulary are not skills that children pick up passively. They require direct and engaging instruction. By practicing with repeated readings, working with partners, and exploring new words through games and mapping, you can help your students become confident, expressive readers who truly understand what they’re reading. These activities are designed to make practice feel less like a chore and more like a discovery.
Use Repeated Reading
Repeated reading is a straightforward and powerful way to build automaticity. The idea is simple: have a student read the same short passage or text multiple times. With each reading, their speed and accuracy improve, allowing them to focus more on expression and rhythm. This practice helps them move from choppy, word-by-word reading to a smoother, more natural flow. Using engaging and age-appropriate decodable books is perfect for this activity. The familiarity of the text builds confidence and helps students experience what fluent reading feels like, which is incredibly motivating.
Try Partner Reading
Reading aloud can be intimidating, but partner reading creates a supportive and low-stakes environment for practice. Pair students up and have them take turns reading a passage to each other. This “performance” aspect encourages them to read with expression and clarity. It also gives them a chance to listen to a peer, which can model good fluency. You can pair students of similar abilities or a slightly stronger reader with one who needs more support. The goal is to create a positive experience that builds both skill and confidence. For students who need more direct support, working one-on-one with PRIDE Reading Specialists can provide that same focused, encouraging practice.
Play Vocabulary Games
Learning new words shouldn’t feel like a vocabulary quiz. Turn it into a game to make the process fun and memorable. Activities like word-building exercises, where students use prefixes and suffixes to create new words, can be very effective. You could also create a “graffiti wall” on a whiteboard where students write and illustrate new words they encounter. Even simple games like Pictionary or charades with vocabulary words can deepen a student’s understanding by connecting the word to an action or image. These interactive methods help words stick in a child’s long-term memory far better than rote memorization.
Map New Words
Word mapping is a visual strategy that helps students explore the meaning of a new word from multiple angles. Using a simple graphic organizer, a student can “map” a word by writing its definition, listing synonyms and antonyms, drawing a picture of it, and using it in a sentence. This technique encourages students to think critically about the relationships between words and how they function in context. It’s a core component of a structured literacy approach because it makes the abstract concept of a word’s meaning concrete and visible, which is especially helpful for visual learners and students with processing disorders.
How to Strengthen Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is the ultimate goal of learning to read. It’s the ability to understand, interpret, and find meaning in a text. Once a child can decode words accurately (phonics) and read with appropriate speed and expression (fluency), the focus shifts to making sense of it all. Strong comprehension skills depend on a solid foundation in the other core components of reading, which is why a structured literacy approach is so effective. It builds these skills systematically, ensuring students have the tools they need to not just read the words, but to think critically about them. This is especially crucial for children with learning differences like dyslexia, who benefit immensely from explicit instruction that connects decoding with meaning.
The following strategies are designed to help your students move beyond simple decoding and become active, thoughtful readers. These activities encourage them to engage with the text on a deeper level, making connections and building a lasting understanding of what they read. Think of these as tools for your teaching toolkit that empower students to interact with stories and information, rather than just passively receiving them. By integrating these practices into your instruction, you can help every learner build the confidence to tackle complex texts and truly enjoy the process of reading.
Focus on Text Structure
Helping students recognize how a text is organized is a powerful step toward better comprehension. Most informational texts follow predictable patterns. When students learn to identify these, they know what to expect and can follow the author’s ideas more easily. According to research from Reading Rockets, “Teaching students about different structures—such as cause and effect, problem and solution, or chronological order—enables them to anticipate the type of information they will encounter and how it is organized.”
A great activity is to use graphic organizers. For a story with a cause-and-effect structure, students can fill out a chart with two columns. For a text that compares and contrasts, a Venn diagram works perfectly. This makes the structure visual and concrete, helping students see the relationships between ideas.
Introduce Active Reading Strategies
Active reading turns reading from a passive activity into an engaging conversation with the text. It’s all about teaching students to think while they read. As noted by Literacy Worldwide, “Active reading strategies, such as annotating texts, highlighting key ideas, and making notes in the margins, encourage students to engage with the material.” This direct interaction helps them process information more deeply and remember what they’ve learned.
You can start simply by giving students sticky notes to jot down thoughts, questions, or connections as they read. Encourage them to underline words they don’t know or highlight sentences that seem important. This simple act of marking up a text keeps their minds focused and helps them take ownership of their learning.
Teach Students to Ask Questions
Curious readers are comprehending readers. Fostering a habit of asking questions before, during, and after reading is one of the most effective ways to deepen understanding. This practice encourages students to set a purpose for reading and actively search for answers. As experts at Heinemann point out, “Encouraging students to ask questions before, during, and after reading fosters a deeper understanding of the text.” This process helps them clarify confusion and connect new information to what they already know.
Before reading, ask students to look at the title and pictures and ask, “What do I think this will be about?” During reading, prompt them with, “What are you wondering right now?” Afterward, have them reflect on what questions were answered and what they still want to know.
Practice Summarizing Texts
Summarizing is a skill that requires students to identify the most important ideas in a text and retell them in their own words. It’s a fantastic way to check for understanding because it separates the main ideas from the smaller details. As explained on the HMH blog, “Summarizing is a critical skill that helps students distill information and focus on the main ideas.” When students can successfully summarize, it shows they have grasped the core message of the text.
For fictional stories, you can use the “Somebody-Wanted-But-So-Then” framework. For non-fiction, challenge students to write a single sentence that captures the main idea of a paragraph or section. These exercises train them to pinpoint key information and build a concise understanding.
Use a Multisensory Approach
One of the most powerful principles aligned with the Science of Reading is using a multisensory approach to instruction. This simply means teaching with activities that engage more than one sense at a time—typically sight, sound, and touch. For many children, especially those with learning differences like dyslexia, learning to read isn’t just a visual or auditory task. Connecting letters and sounds to physical movement and touch creates stronger, more resilient neural pathways for literacy.
This method is the heart of the Orton-Gillingham approach, which is designed to make abstract concepts like phonemes and graphemes concrete and memorable. When a student sees a letter, says its sound, and traces its shape simultaneously, they are building a deep, lasting understanding of how our language works. Integrating multisensory activities isn’t about adding more work to your plate; it’s about making the work you’re already doing more effective and inclusive for every single learner in your classroom or home. It transforms reading instruction from a passive exercise into an active, engaging experience where students can truly connect with the material.
Activities for Visual Learners
Visual learners thrive when they can see what they are learning. You can support them by making reading concepts as visible as possible. Use color-coding to highlight different phonics patterns, vowel teams, or parts of speech within words and sentences. Graphic organizers are fantastic tools for helping students map out story elements or organize vocabulary words. Flashcards, anchor charts, and colorful alphabet books provide constant visual reinforcement of letter-sound connections. Offering choices in reading materials and using visual aids are simple ways to create a more inclusive classroom where all students feel seen and supported.
Exercises for Auditory Learners
For students who learn best by listening, auditory activities are key. These learners benefit from hearing the sounds of language clearly and repeatedly. Practice phonemic awareness by having students echo sounds, identify rhymes, and listen for specific phonemes in words. Reading aloud is a classic for a reason—it models fluency, expression, and proper pronunciation. You can also record short passages for students to listen to. To make listening more active, teach them to ask questions or take mental notes as they hear a story. Providing study guides or scripts can also help auditory learners adapt to your teaching strategies and better process what they hear.
Games for Kinesthetic Learners
Kinesthetic learners need to move to learn. Sitting still can be a real challenge, so get them on their feet! Use letter tiles, magnetic letters, or even letters from a board game to have students physically build words. Writing letters in a sand tray, in shaving cream, or with their finger on a textured surface provides valuable tactile feedback. Skywriting is another great activity where students use their whole arm to trace letters in the air. These creative teaching strategies make learning tangible and help cement concepts through muscle memory, turning abstract symbols into something they can feel and manipulate.
How to Combine the Senses
The real magic happens when you layer these sensory inputs together. A truly multisensory activity doesn’t just cater to one learning style; it combines sight, sound, and touch into a single, powerful exercise. For example, give a student a letter card (visual), have them say the letter’s sound out loud (auditory), and then ask them to trace the letter on the card with their finger (kinesthetic). This layering is a core principle of Universal Design for Learning, which helps make instruction inclusive for diverse learners. By consistently engaging multiple senses, you create a rich learning environment that gives every student multiple ways to grasp and retain critical reading skills.
Create an Inclusive Reading Environment
Building an inclusive reading environment means creating a space where every child feels seen, supported, and capable of success. It’s about recognizing that students learn differently and providing them with the specific tools and encouragement they need to grow. When children feel safe to take risks and make mistakes, they are more likely to stay engaged and build the confidence that is so crucial for reading development. An inclusive classroom celebrates progress, not just perfection, and adapts to the unique journey of each learner. This approach ensures that all students, regardless of their background or learning profile, have the opportunity to thrive.
Differentiate Your Instruction
Differentiated instruction is simply about tailoring your teaching to meet each child where they are. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, you can adjust the content, the process, or even the final product to match a student’s readiness and learning style. For some, this might mean working with different sets of words; for others, it could be offering a choice in how they demonstrate their understanding, like drawing a picture instead of writing a paragraph. A flexible, structured literacy curriculum provides a strong foundation, allowing you to easily modify lessons to give every student the right level of challenge and support, ensuring they can all make meaningful progress.
How to Support Diverse Learners
Supporting diverse learners starts with fostering a classroom culture of connection and respect. When students feel valued for their unique strengths, they are more open to learning. This is especially true for children with learning differences. Understanding the signs of dyslexia and other challenges allows you to provide compassionate, effective support. Focus on giving specific, constructive feedback that highlights effort and growth. Celebrate small victories to build momentum and confidence. By creating an environment that emphasizes individual strengths and provides a safety net for challenges, you empower every child to participate fully and feel successful in their reading journey.
Organize Small Group Activities
Small group instruction is a powerful tool for meeting diverse needs. Breaking the class into smaller groups allows you to provide targeted support and observe student progress up close. You can group students with similar skill levels to work on specific concepts or create mixed-level groups where peers can learn from one another. Learning stations are another fantastic way to encourage active engagement. While one group works directly with you, others can practice independently with hands-on materials. Using resources like decodable books in these small settings gives students the chance to apply their skills in a low-pressure, collaborative environment, making learning feel more like play.
Adapt Activities for Every Skill Level
Making activities accessible for every student doesn’t have to be complicated. Simple adaptations can make a world of difference. Before starting a new text, you can pre-teach tricky vocabulary to build confidence and aid comprehension. Providing visual supports, such as flashcards or posters from a set of alphabet books, helps reinforce letter-sound connections. It’s also helpful to allow for different ways for students to share what they know. Some may excel at verbal explanations, while others might prefer to draw or build. By offering these alternatives, you ensure that all learners can engage meaningfully with the material and proudly showcase their understanding, regardless of their current reading or writing abilities.
How to Measure Reading Progress
As you introduce these fun activities, it’s just as important to track how your students are progressing. Measuring reading growth isn’t about high-stakes testing; it’s about gaining a clear understanding of a child’s strengths and the areas where they need a little more help. With the right approach, you can use simple checks to make sure your instruction is hitting the mark and every student is moving forward on their path to becoming a confident reader.
Choose the Right Assessment Tools
To truly understand a student’s progress, you need tools that measure the specific skills foundational to the Science of Reading. This means going beyond general reading quizzes to assess individual components like phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency. Think of these as quick, regular check-ins rather than big, stressful exams. Progress-monitoring assessments are designed to track a student’s reading skills over time, showing you if they’re on track to meet their goals. Using an early reading assessment as a guiding tool helps you pinpoint exactly what to teach next, ensuring your instruction is always targeted and effective.
Use Data to Guide Your Teaching
The information you gather from assessments is pure gold for your teaching. This data helps you see exactly what a child has mastered and which specific skills need more practice. Instead of guessing, you can confidently plan your next lesson based on real evidence of your student’s needs. This diagnostic approach is at the heart of structured literacy, which uses assessment to inform instruction every step of the way. By incorporating these checks into your daily or weekly routine, you can get a clear picture of a student’s strengths and areas for improvement, leading to more efficient and personalized teaching.
Adjust Activities to Encourage Growth
Once your data shows you where a student needs to focus, you can tailor your activities to meet that need. This is where assessment and instruction come together beautifully. Is a child struggling to decode words with consonant blends? It’s time to pull out activities that specifically practice that skill. Is fluency the main hurdle? Let’s schedule more repeated reading or partner reading sessions. A high-quality curriculum should be flexible enough to allow for these adjustments. The goal is to create a seamless cycle where you assess a skill, teach it, and use activities to reinforce it, ensuring the student is always working on what will help them grow the most.
Give Extra Support to Struggling Readers
Sometimes, assessments will show that a student needs more than just a quick adjustment to an activity. This isn’t a sign of failure—it’s a crucial piece of information that helps you get them the right help. Consistent difficulty with foundational skills can be an early indicator of a learning difference like dyslexia. For learners who need a more focused and intensive approach, working with trained professionals can make all the difference. Programs that connect you with PRIDE Reading Specialists provide that extra layer of targeted, one-on-one support to help every child build the confidence and skills they need to succeed.
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Frequently Asked Questions
This is a lot of information. Where should I even begin? It can definitely feel like a lot, but you don’t have to do everything at once. The best place to start is right at the beginning with phonemic awareness. Before a child can connect sounds to letters, they need to be able to hear the individual sounds in spoken words. Focus on playful, sound-based games like rhyming or “I Spy” with sounds. Once your child is comfortable playing with sounds, you can begin to introduce the letters that make them.
What’s the real difference between phonemic awareness and phonics? This is a great question because these two skills are so closely related. The easiest way to think about it is that phonemic awareness is all about sound and can be done with your eyes closed. It’s the ability to hear that the word “cat” is made of three sounds: /k/ /a/ /t/. Phonics is the next step, where you connect those sounds to written letters. It’s when a child learns that the sound /k/ can be written with the letter C.
How much time should I spend on these activities each day? Consistency is far more important than duration. You’ll see much better results from 10-15 minutes of focused, fun practice every day than from a long, overwhelming session once a week. Weave these activities into your daily routine. You can play sound games in the car or practice building words with magnetic letters for a few minutes before dinner. The goal is to make it a positive and regular part of your day.
My child can read all the words correctly but has no idea what the story was about. What should I do? This is a very common hurdle, and it’s a sign that your child has strong decoding skills but needs to build their comprehension. It’s time to shift your focus. Start talking about the meaning of new words before you read. After reading a page, pause and ask simple questions like, “What do you think will happen next?” or “How do you think that character is feeling?” This helps them move from just reading words to thinking about the story.
I’ve been trying these activities, but my child is still really struggling. What’s the next step? First, know that you are doing a great job by being so attentive to your child’s needs. If you’ve been consistent with these strategies and your child isn’t making progress, it might mean they need a more intensive and systematic approach. This is often the case for children with learning differences like dyslexia. The next step could be exploring a comprehensive structured literacy curriculum or connecting with a reading specialist who can provide targeted, one-on-one support.