Ways To Help Y our C hild at Home Reading Ways to help your child become a better reader

1. Ways To Help Your Child at Home • Reading • Ways to help your child become a better reader • -Read, Read, Read, Read (practice)! Read at least 3 books to or with your child daily. • -Practice phonological awareness skills. • -Practice letters and sounds, including multiple letter sounds (ex. th, sh, br, st) • -Practice the words on the Dolch Word List • -Practice using the word families • -Point out the title, front of the book, author, illustrator, back of the book, pictures, words on a page and punctuation. • -When you read, explain that the words on a page are read from left to right. You may want to move your finger over the words as you read them. • Games to play at home with letters and sounds • -Letters are everywhere --Draw your child's attention to letters and words in his/her environment (signs, cereal boxes, toy boxes, menus, etc.)-Letter Writer--Have your child trace letters on/in different surfaces (sand, rice, cloth, etc.) Say the name of the letter with your child as they form the letter.-Print the Letters -- Practice printing upper and lower case letters. (one time each week)-Tactile Letters – Make a tactile letter for finger tracing.  Write a letter on large paper.  Trace with glue. Sprinkle with sand, salt, or rice. When dry, have your child trace the letter with his/her finger and say the name of the letter.-Letter Search -- Name a letter and ask your child to find as many different sizes, colors, and styles of that letter as possible to cut and glue onto a sheet of paper.-"I Spy" letter sounds -- "I spy something that begins with the sound of b."   Or, say, "I spy a ____.  What letter do you hear at the beginning of that word?"-Brainstorm--Give your child a sound and ask him/her to think of as many words as they can that start with that same sound.-Search the House -- Your child can search around the house for objects whose names begin with a certain letter. (exp. B- bananas, brush, band-aid, belt, etc.)-Picture Sound Collage -- Ask your child to search through magazines, etc. for pictures that start with a certain letter.  Have them glue all the pictures they find onto one sheet of paper to form a letter collage.

2. WRITING • Ways to practice writing at home • Write down a story your child tells you and read it out loud together. Ask your child to draw pictures that go with the words. • Starting letter formation with letters they already see on a regular basis is VERY important! • Make sure that if you help them write their names, that the first letter is an uppercase letter and the rest are lowercase. • Write their name on a piece of paper and cut it into a puzzle to play with. • MATH • Ways to practice math at home • Count everything! “How many magazines came in the mail?” “How many more letters will we need to get to have 10 letters?” “Which are there more of, magazines or letters? If we got one more how many would there be? Two? Three? If I lost one how many would be left?”  • Find numbers everywhere! Point them out on price tags, at the grocery store and anywhere that you see them! • Find patterns everywhere! It could be tiles that are blue white blue white….. • Find shapes everywhere! When you find a shape count how many sides and corners they have. • Practice simple addition and subtraction using groups of objects