Children Need to Enjoy Reading

Encouraging a child to read and enjoy it can sometimes be very difficult. Children who struggle to learn to read and fail soon fall behind their classmates and learn that reading is not fun. When classmates read books during quiet reading times the struggling reader grabs a book and pretends to read. When it’s time to read aloud in front of classmates, the poor reader learns to a.) Go to the bathroom, b.) Visit the nurse’s office, c.) Misbehave d.) Struggle through the reading feeling horribly humiliated by the time they are done. By the time a child who has difficulty learning to read gets to third grade they have fallen two years behind their peers, started to gain the attention of their teachers and learned to hate reading.

What’s the solution? First, as teachers, we need to begin documenting reading difficulties immediately. Interventions, such as extra reading time beyond the allotted times need to be provided. Make adjustments in the difficulty level of a struggling reader and provide them with plenty of books that they can enjoy.  Make sure that reading is occurring at home. Children who are second language learners often have parents who do not speak English and are unable to read to their children at home. Providing picture books, with supporting text is best for these children. A great website for this, if a child has Internet access at home is Big Universe. The choices are endless and the child can keep a reading log so you can track their books and do repeated readings in the classroom. 

It can be also be difficult choosing good quality books for a child, struggling or otherwise. Books with too much text do not support younger children or children who are struggling. Big Universe  has picture books on every topic for all elementary grade levels.

 Why picture books? Colorful pictures that support the reader do marvelous things for the struggling reader. They give a support that nothing else can. We often ask children to visualize as they read but if a child is struggling just to read the words they aren’t able to visualize for comprehension. The books at Big Universe  have already done the visualizing. 

The Big Universe  book Adding and Subtracting at the Lake  is just one example of such a picture book. This book has a reading level of K-1 with a Guided Reading Level of A,B,C. At the end of the book there is a three question math assessment. The book has a picture glossary so the student can be introduced to what a glossary its purpose. Comprehension quizzes can be designed to test for reading comprehension levels of students. Here’s a sample Comprehension Quiz. 

Reading is the most important skill we can give to our children but they have to enjoy it. We need to provide them with appropriately leveled books that they love to read. Big Universe does this with beautiful picture books AND they are online. Children love them! By having the child read from the computer they are incorporating another activity, which children love – technology, another skill they will need for the rest of their lives.

Repeated Reading of a Good Book

The repeated reading of a book is very effective in helping children learn how to read and learn how to learn from their reading. I continued using Our Earth from the website Big Universe for the second week with my students. Working with students with learning disabilities is always eye opening because you can teach them something one day and the next day they have little to no recall of what you taught. On the other hand if you find something that a child really likes and has the back ground knowledge to build on to, it’s amazing how good their memory is. Using Our Earth has really kept my students interested and connected to their learning. The book is bright, colorful and easy to read. The great thing is that each time they read it, they learn something new and they are building their own background knowledge. 

Targeted Testing 

After reading the book Our Earth  as a class using the Smart Board, each of my students went to the book on their own laptops. They were given an 8 question practice SOLQuestions1 (click here) style test. They did well though many missed the questions that require any searching of page numbers. As a teacher, that’s frustrating. The book is clearly laid out with beautiful pictures and illustrations and the information couldn’t be any clearer. I made a second assessment to make sure my students would have plenty of  practice searching for answers! 

I gave the second Targeted Questions (click here) quiz, which is limited to questions related to finding information on specific pages and looking to specific pages for information. This gives the students strategies in answering questions, formulating questions, and using text features. I am not a fan of standardized testing, but Big Universe is giving me some beautiful material to work with that will make my teaching and testing a lot more enjoyable.