All Info About Reading

 If you have kids, chances are very good that you spend a lot of time in the car with them!  Many parents lament this “wasted time,” but there are tons of things to do together while you travel to and from preschool, lessons, friends’ houses, and everywhere else that you go to each week.  In fact, this time can be quite productive!  After all, you’ve got a captive audience, few distractions, and a bit of time on your hands.  So take a look and store up a few of these ideas to use when you’re in charge of the carpool.

Recite Nursery Rhymes

These little gems are a whole lot more meaningful than most people realize.  Sure, they are fun to say and sing, and some are even a bit amusing.  A few teach bits of wisdom that none of us could live without.  Their most important jobs, however, are related to language and learning skills.  Nursery rhymes build many different skills that support the development of early reading and writing abilities.  They develop memory and language skills.  They even help children learn about phonics and the sounds that letters make. 

Nursery rhymes are full of - you guessed it- rhymes!  Rhyming is one of the fundamental concepts that children need to understand well before they can learn to read efficiently.  As your child heads off to school, teachers will introduce a concept called “word families.”  This is the idea that many words have the same ending sounds, and by changing the first sound, we can produce new words.  Often, first steps to reading involve reading words such as these: “The fat cat sat on the mat.”  However, before this learning can be meaningful, children need lots and lots of experience with aural rhymes.  They need to learn to recognize rhymes and produce rhymes.  They need to learn to manipulate sounds to produce new rhyming words.  When you recite rhymes, you are building these skills.

Nursery rhymes also are chock full of alliteration.  Remember rhymes like “Simple Simon”?  How about “Peter Piper”?  Notice how these pieces feature words that begin with the same sounds close together?  This is alliteration.  Children enjoy these rhymes because they are fun to say, but they also help kids understand letter sounds and similarities and differences.  For later reading instruction to be effective, kids need to learn to hear the differences between sounds and notice when the sounds are the same.  Your play with nursery rhymes during the preschool years will cement this skill.

Make Some Nonsense

Help your child build comprehension skills and even a sense of humor by using nonsense.  Take a familiar bit of poetry or prose, and change one word so that the whole piece no longer makes sense.  See if your child can catch you in the act! 

At first, you will want to make your change very obvious.  Put in a word that is opposite or totally different than the one you are replacing.  “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” might become “Twinkle, twinkle, little house.”  Replacing the ending word is also easiest.  Later, when your riders are more proficient, you can replace words from the middle of the line or piece.  Try using a rhyming incorrect word, or one that is closely related or a synonym of the word that you’re replacing, too.

This activity will help your child develop listening skills, which are crucial to school success.  It will also help build those all important memory and discrimination skills.  Reading comprehension depends on a visual version of this skill; children must recognize inconsistencies in text that come when words are misread.  If they can learn to notice when meaning is disrupted, they will be more likely to go back and check their words.

Play Guessing Games

Riddles and games like Twenty Questions help children develop the thinking and reasoning skills that are necessary for success in school.  It’s important, too, that they learn to manage on both sides of the game.  Make sure you give them opportunities to give the clues and ask the riddles as well as trying to guess the answers.  This activity will build the language and thinking skills needed to get meaning from text when they start to read, and it will lay the groundwork for written expression, as well.

Try Brainstorming

Making lists can be a great distraction when the ride gets long.  You can base your lists on nearly any concept you’d like.  Choose from concepts, like animals or furniture, color words, or phonics ideas.  See how many words your group can think of that start with M or that have the short A sound like in “cat.”  Try making lists of rhyming words or words with two or more syllables.

Activities like this one build fluency.  This is the ability to think of lots of different possible answers quickly and easily.  It’s also a good way to help children learn new vocabulary words.  When they run out of ideas for their lists, be sure to offer two or three new words that they didn’t think of.  For example, if they are making a list of animals, you can add something more unusual, like an ibex or a flamingo.  Be prepared to define your new words and help the children understand where they fit into concepts that they already know.  You can also dress this game up by trying to generate your list in alphabetical order.  Can your children come up with items that start with letter A, then letter B?

Break Words Into Parts

Another important prereading skill is the ability to segment words into individual sounds and blend them back together again.  A separate but related task is to break words into syllables and blend them back together again.  Down the road, this game will help children who are sounding out unfamiliar printed words.  They will have had lots of practice (hopefully) in hearing /t/-/o/-/p/ and figuring out that the secret word is “top.” 

To play these kinds of games, start with simple two and three sound words.  Say one sound at a time, just like you did when you were learning to sound out words in your early school years.  Say the sounds distinctly and slowly and see if your child can mentally reassemble them and tell you what word you were saying.  Give the child a chance to turn the tables and say a word slowly in similar fashion for you to guess.  Increase the difficulty by using longer words.  When the kids are bored with this version, try doing the same thing with syllables. 

Of course, you don’t have to wait until you are in the car to enjoy these pastimes!  Try them anytime you want to play a game and build skills.  Play for short periods of time, and always stop before your child gets bored.  Remember that this is supposed to be fun, not work time.  If your youngster isn’t enjoying the game, try it again in a few months.  And above all, have fun!

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