Keep Your Child Engaged in Reading All Summer Long!

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TEACH YOUR CHILD TO READ!

As a Reading Specialist (My day job! 🙂 I find that many parents let children fall back in reading skills over the summer. We’re going to show you some fun, neat, and super inexpensive ways to keep your child engaged in reading all summer long and TEACH YOUR CHILD TO READ! Many parents have the misconception that reading has to be sitting at a desk/table and be totally boring, and this is NOT the case!  We’ll show you how to make reading fun for your kiddo!

Check out some of our other articles:
What your child needs to do BEFORE they start to read

Why Sight Words are So Important

1. Play games. Reviewing reading skills and learning new skills by playing games is a GREAT way to engage your child without the learning appearing as “work.” You can find some FREE printable gameboards HERE! These games can include sight-words (Learn more about sight words HERE).   I LOVE using the Mrs. Perkins List of sight words, and you may need to print these lists off and see which ones your child knows first before you can create the game. However, once you have your list, include those words on the gameboard, grab your dice and pawns, and get busy playing!

Another game for learning words/sight words is memory. This is SO easy to make. You only need a list of words, index cards, and a pencil (Don’t use marker, because it will show through and that will definitely spoil the game!).  However, this can be used for word families and sight words.

2. Take advantage of a captive audience. Travel and bedtime are GREAT times to implement reading activities.  As you can see the picture above, we bought our son his own headlamp just so we could read under the covers! When we’re traveling we always play a game of making words out of road signs. For example, if we see “an” in “Grant Street,” we say “I made a word!” and share our word with the group.  This can be as easy as finding early reading sight words, or as complicated as making new words out of signs or seeing how many words you can make out of a sign. McDonalds has sad, sand, so, land, lands, etc.

This is also a great time to read aloud to your children (as long as you don’t get motion sickness).  We will talk more about read-alouds in the next point!

Spatula/Fly Swatter Game Write the words your child is learning on index cards, and turn them over.  Have hubby or an older brother or sister join in the game, by each holding a spatula or fly swatter. You call the word, and whoever hits it with their spatula/swatter first gets one point! Add these points up at the end of the game and see who wins (We play this with my son ALL the time, and hubby throws the game each time so that we can cover more words!).

3.  Read aloud to your children. Sometimes parents have the misconception that their child has to do all the reading. There should be a healthy mix of the two, and reading aloud to your children can happen many different places. This can happen while travelling in the car, at bedtime, and while children are playing (as long as there are no other noises around).  I like to read to my son at bedtime, because he’s a swirl of motion during the day, and at bedtime he’s tired enough that I can have a captive audience!  This is also a GREAT time to read your child a book that he/she is interested in, but is too hard to read by him/herself.

There is a book called the Read Aloud Handbook for Children by Jim Trelease that is a GREAT way to help you learn how to read aloud to your children (even if they’re older!).

4. There’s an app for that. With all the technology available, you can DEFINTELY engage your child in MANY, MANY activities for reading via the iPhone, Android Phone, iPad, etc.  In fact, many times you can find FREE apps for practicing skills! For older children, let them play their own game of “Words with Friends.”  My son loves the Kindle, and so there are free apps for the Kindle as well that help engage kids in reading. There are also Kindle books that come through FREE for kids as well! (We have a daily Kindle Freebie list on Debt Free Spending that often includes children’s books).

Here are some great FREE reading app links:

• Scholastic Article
• Best Apps for Kids
• iPod App Reviews (Kid Apps)

5. Take advantage of rainy days. When there’s no sun, there’s no swimming, so head into your local bookstore or library. I LOVE taking my son to our local library because it is so inviting for kids. There are fairy tale characters painted on the walls, and they have bean bag chairs and other comfy places to read. However, the larger book chains also do a great job with making the childrens’ area very inviting! Both places usually have summer reading activities, which kids usually love as well!

6. Use free online resources. There are SO MANY web resources that are free, that google brings you millions of sites available with free printable activities as well!  Some of my favorites are Starfall, PBS Kids, & Scholastic.

7. Use a Dry Erase Board. This is one of my favorite interactive writing tools, and it’s easy to use and portable! We use our dry erase board to learn new words and skills, and we use it to play word games. Hangman is one of our favorites.

8. Writing to Read. My son just finished Kindergarten, and he LOVES to write because his teacher implemented the Kid Writing program into his classroom. He has been asking me if he can write in his journal most days, so I consider this a wonderful thing, since he is a boy! Kid Writing has taught him to love to write, and I’m so grateful that his teacher instilled this love in him. However, it’s an added bonus, because learning to read and learning to write a partial reciprocal processes! So, learning to write helps him read and vice versa!

Therefore, we have TONS of markers, writing implements, writing paper, journals, notebooks, and more for him to access when he’s in a writing mood. He has cool “kid” pens and pencils and I even have a journal like his Kid Writing journal where he can draw a picture and then write his story underneath.  This Mead MEA09956 Primary Journal K-2nd Grade is a perfect example of one you can use for primary children who can’t write on smaller lines yet. If you have an older child, there are LOTS of neat journals you can buy!

These are just SOME ways to keep your child engaged in books throughout the summer, and we hope this has been a helpful resource to you! Please comment any thoughts/ideas below to help share with others as well!  By the way, my son just asked me if I would read him a book! Oh, the irony!

Working with your child at home