10 Strategies: Improve your child’s reading and writing skills

childs reading and writing skills

10 Strategies: Improve your child’s reading and writing skills

Reading and writing are essential for the correct cognitive development of children. These practices are responsible for developing language, increasing vocabulary, and improving spelling. In addition, they are a mechanism for transmitting knowledge, ideas, and opinions, therefore, they are instruments of the utmost importance for every child in the process of knowing the world.

What is the importance of reading and writing?

For many children, reading time is an important part of their day today, it is a time where they can share with their parents, but it is also a space to enter a different world. By reading with them every day, you create the habit of reading, which, if it is constant, can be maintained as they grow. This practice allows them to develop imagination and the desire to expand their knowledge. Does your child not remember what he reads?

For its part, writing is an excellent way for children to express their thoughts, their dreams, their daily lives, their adventures, and what they imagine. Plus, it’s a great way for them to learn to organize their ideas. Writing correctly helps them become better readers and vice versa.

We tell you 10 strategies to improve your child’s reading and writing skills:

Read together: choose a short book or poem, it is ideal to read it while your child listens and mentally follows the story or poem. Then ask your child to read the first line of the text after you. Do the same exercise again with the second line of the text and continue until you finish. Repeat this activity with the same text several times and with different stories during the week.

Model fluent reading: Children learn from what they see around them. Read to your child to show him what fluent reading sounds like. Ginny Oswalt, a psychologist at Thomas Edison State College, recommends reading naturally, with emotion, and with the appropriate tone of voice for reading. It is important that the child is the one who chooses the book he wants to listen to.

Read aloud: Even if they have difficulties or make mistakes, it is essential that parents motivate them to continue. Pause, review the word that is causing you difficulty and start over. The Ministry of Culture affirms that ” 15 minutes of reading aloud a day increases their performance in school ” and improves language skills.

Dictionary, the best ally: it is important that your child has a dictionary every time he reads. Many words are going to be new and you need to know their meaning to understand the context of the story.

What did you understand? It is important to analyze what you have read, but especially what the child has learned. If you do not understand what you have just read, it is necessary to pause and calmly explain the meaning, possibly your confusion is in some unknown word. Children should know why and what they read for. Reading comprehension makes children become regular readers.

Avoid correcting spelling and writing with long pages: it is not necessary for your child to write the same error 20 times, the only thing that this achieves is that the child is distracted and make the same mistake again. Two or three times is sufficient, but the spelling error must be corrected immediately. How to improve my child’s spelling?

Work daily on the words that are difficult for him: make a didactic board with a mobile alphabet. The Parents in School blog recommends this tactic, as it allows the child to practice the words that are difficult for him, and thus, through a game, he can learn to write them correctly. It is ideal that every day writes the word that you have just learned, this in order to expand your vocabulary.

Accompany him in the process: sit with the child and guide him in the writing process. Motivation is of great importance “Now read it and tell me if you understand”, “fine, but let’s write it in another way to make it clearer”, “What do you mean?” This will allow the child to learn to write correctly. You must be consistent with this process, as writing requires daily practice.

Exercises to improve writing: in the variety of activities is the success of learning. Children are easily distracted, we must be creative when teaching them.

  • Dictation.
  • The use of the dictionary.
  • The spelling games.
  • Audiobooks.
  • Board games that require writing.

The Colorín Colorado organization recommends that children write instructions to take care of the pet, write a letter to a relative, make a shopping list to go to the market, motivate them to write a personal diary. This way you will practice writing daily without making it a boring subject.

Basic rules:  to ensure that your child writes better you should start by teaching him how to handle the pencil correctly. Set up space for him to write quietly. Come to an agreement, how much time will you spend writing, how many pages will you do, how many stories will you write in the week. Avoid doing it in bed, on the couch, with the cell phone or television nearby, as this reduces attention and retention of information. Techniques to read faster.

It is important to remember that both reading and writing should be a pleasure and not an obligation. The goal is to help your child improve his skills, so everything should be appropriate for your child’s age. Any time is a good time to motivate you, street signs, magazines, newspapers, etc., can be excellent options to review reading and writing. ” Writing clearly and fluently is necessary to perform academically.” 

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