Give your child these magnetic letters or letter cards: a, e, i, o, c, b, p, t, n, m, and h. Using the letters, make a simple word like pot. Ask him to make the same word by matching each letter below yours. Remind him to say the word slowly and think about the sounds that he hears at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. Repeat with other simple words, or let him make his own words using these letters.

Play the Echo Game

Say a word with two or three sounds (such as go or man). Ask your child to say the word and break it into its sound parts (go/g-o; man/m-a-n). If this is too easy for him/her, try using words with four sounds, such as jump or wind.

Remember to keep the activities quick and fun. Most important, enjoy your time together reading, writing, and talking!

Play a making words game. Give your child magnetic letters or letter cards. You tell your child a two- or three-letter word to make that has a letter pattern she/he can hear. Some possibilities are: bag, hid, set, wig, mop, hut, mad, red, pen, lit. If this is easy for her/him, make it more challenging by asking her/him to change the first letter in the word to make a different word, or try words that end with a silent e, such as bike, mile and late.

Remember to keep the activities quick and fun. Most important, enjoy your time together reading, writing, and talking!

Rhyming words is an excellent reading skill. Play a rhyming word game. Say a word such as hop, and ask your child to say a word that rhymes, such as top. Continue taking turns until you run out of rhyming words.

Play the Switch a Letter Game. Use magnetic letters or letter cards to make a simple three-letter word such as can, and place it on the table. Ask your child to read the word. Next, ask him/her to switch one of the letters to make a new word. For example, she could switch the n in can to a t to make cat. Ask him/her to read the new word to make sure it is a real word. Repeat the process, switching the letters as man times as possible. If time allows, play again with another three-letter word.

Remember to keep the activities quick and fun. Most important, enjoy your time together reading, writing and talking!

Many parents are alarmed when their child brings home a book that they can easily read. They want their children to be reading more difficult books. Reading more difficult books does not mean your child is learning more and reading easier books does not mean your child is not learning at all.

When I first begin with readers, we are constantly building on what they know. These texts will support the readers and help them extend their skills. Books are sent home with the children when they can read them. They will practice fluency with this known text. They will use picture clues to help them with words that are outside their reading ability. I WANT them to use the picture clues to figure out an unknown word. For young readers, much of the meaning is conveyed in the illustrations. The pictures are a good way to engage them with the text and enrich their comprehension.

To read, children must solve the words of a text "on the run" while reading continuous print. There are many strategies to accomplish this. Struggling readers may have difficulty with many or all of these strategies. Because they may not know enough words, they have to work on many of them. When they have to work on so many words, the meaning of the text breaks down. Reading a book with a repetitive structure helps a reader smooth out the process.

Some students 'memorize' the structure of the text. They 'love' to read the book without looking! Have your child point to the words and make sure they are reading the word they are pointing to.

There are so many things your reader is working on. Enjoy their success of reading their book well. Encourage their fluent reading. Have fun enjoying books together!

When helping your child read at home, several strategies may be used to aid in decoding unknown words.

1. Tell the child to look at the picture. You may tell the child the word is something that can be seen in the picture, if that is the case.

2. Tell the child to look for chunks in the word, such as it in sit, at in mat, or and and ing in standing.

3. Ask the child to get his/her mouth ready to say the word by shaping the mouth for the beginning letter.

4. Ask the child if the word looks like another word s/he knows. Does bed look like red?, for example.

5. Ask the child to go on and read to the end of the sentence. Often by reading the other words in context, the child can figure out the unknown word.

6. If the child says the wrong word while reading, ask questions like:

Does it make sense?

Does it sound right?

Does it look right?

Have you ever wondered what to do when a teacher tells you your child needs help in reading? Stay tuned for helpful hints and activities that require little or no preparation and are easy to do. Some of the best can be done in the car driving to and from all those activities! But always remember, one of the best things you can do is to simply read to your child. Enjoy an old favorite, a new genre or favorite author, just read! When you do, you model good reading behavior for your child. Even if you make a mistake, you show them that good readers correct their mistakes. Change your voice, read fluently, explain some vocabulary, discuss feelings, predict what might happen next, ask questions about what you've read. All of these help your child become a better reader. So enjoy and read a good book tonight!