How to Support Your Child’s Reading Comprehension

It’s never too early to start reading with your child! Reading books with your child from infancy will support their listening, speech, language and literacy skills to develop. Talking about the characters, storyline and pictures in books is an important step for developing your child’s later literacy skills.

Reading aloud is one of the most important things that parents can do to support their child to develop reading and writing skills later on. Here are some tips for reading aloud with your child.

• Read aloud to your child for 15 minutes every day to prepare your child for reading when school starts.
• Talk about the characters in the story.
• Talk about the sequence of events and motives of characters.
• Repeat stories, focus on different aspects each time you re-read favorite books.
• Retell the story with your child using toys, pictures or dress up.
• Point to the words as you read them.
• Encourage your child to turn the pages when you have finished reading and discussing each one.
• Use different voices for different characters to keep your child engaged.

To become good readers, children need:

• An age appropriate vocabulary to know the words for objects, actions, mental state words, description words etc which they will encounter in their reading.
• To have learned to describe actions, objects, events; to tell stories.
• An interest in letters and their sounds.
• An interest in books and in print.
• To be able to recognize rhymes and alliteration, and segment words into sounds.
• An understanding of words used in different contexts

There are various approaches to teach reading, however alongside learning letters, sounds or whole words, children must understand and be able to use a variety of words in different contexts to ensure they understand the text they read.

How To Improve Reading Comprehension

• Discussions around the topic of the story will support reading comprehension and put a context to new words.
• Asking and answering questions about the text may support your child to understand what is happening in the story, and it will allow you to identify parts of the story they do not understand, so that you can explain further.
• Visualizing what is being read helps children to recall stories, link the story sequence together and put themselves in the shoes of the characters. This ability to visualize a story is connected with your child’s prior world knowledge of the topic.
• Activities to improve prior knowledge about the topic of the story will promote reading comprehension.

Looking for new reading activities you can easily do at home? The Murat Reader Series is a great resource for that – free handout included!

Singing and rhyming together can also help develop your child’s listening and language skills. Rehab expert Sera Jang explains how to make singing rhymes part of your daily activities.