The Struggle of Wanting to Help But Don’t Know How? – Reading Edition

This is Simply Angeline, and I’m Angeline. The channel dedicated to the storytelling of diverse children’s stories so kids can feel inspired and seen!

Bringing a child into this world and watching them grow and learn life’s different lessons can be a gift, and sometimes… extremely hard. Just picture this: your baby is starting kindergarten, making friends, having fun, and learning. As the days, weeks, and months go on, you start to notice things with their reading skills or speech, but assume they just need more time. Now they’re not 5 anymore, but 7, 8, or 9 years old, struggling to put syllables and concepts together, getting frustrated with themselves and not wanting to give it another try.

As a parent, you may feel helpless or even self-conscious about your own skills. Not knowing what to do or where to turn. This feeling or misunderstanding is so common among parents, especially when it comes to teaching children how to read. It takes a village to raise a child—and being part of so many villages as a teacher and the founder of Simply Angeline, I believe it’s my duty to bridge the gap and give parents the tools to educate themselves while also learning how to support their child in becoming a better reader.

That’s why I created this post—to help you understand the key skills that build strong readers and how you can support your child every step of the way.

What Are Foundational Skills?

Let’s start with defining and explaining the most important thing: foundational reading skills. This can sound intimidating and scary, but I promise once I lay it out, it can give you a inside look into what skills your child should have.

Foundational reading skills are the basic building blocks that help children learn how to read—like knowing letters and sounds, sounding out words, and being able to break words apart and put them back together. See, it’s making a bit more sense now, isn’t it? Not as scary since I laid it out and broke it down.

Speaking of breaking it down, let’s talk about these skills because you may be thinking, “What type of skills do they need to know so they can read?” If you look right above, you’ll see a picture of a pyramid—a reading skills pyramid. Each section gives a short summary of what it is and what kids should be doing in each layer of the pyramid. Let’s look at fluency. Fluency is the pace of reading; how quickly they do it. There is also phonics, connecting sounds to written letters or letter combinations.

How Are These Skills Taught?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now that we have an idea of what foundational reading skills are and what those skills look like, let’s look at how these various skills can be taught.

In classrooms, teachers use a variety of methods to teach these skills, including:

• Phonemic Awareness Activities: These help children hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words.
• Phonics Instruction: Teaching the relationship between letters and sounds to help children decode new words.
• Fluency Practice: Repeated reading of texts to build speed and accuracy.
• Vocabulary Building: Introducing new words and their meanings to enhance comprehension.
• Comprehension Strategies: Teaching children to understand and interpret what they read.

These methods are often integrated into daily lessons, using engaging activities and materials to make learning to read an enjoyable experience.

How Can You Support at Home?

Supporting your child’s reading development at home doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are some simple ways to reinforce foundational reading skills:

• Read Aloud Daily: Spend time reading together every day. Choose books that interest your child and discuss the stories to build comprehension. You can switch it up with you reading the book, you can take turns or watch a read aloud at home. Simply Angeline is pretty good! 😉
• Play Word Games: Engage in games like rhyming, segmenting sounds, or blending sounds to strengthen phonemic awareness.
• Label Household Items: Place labels on common items around the house to reinforce word recognition. You can label the lamp, table, window, door, etc.
• Create a Reading Routine: Set aside a specific time each day dedicated to reading activities.
• Use Educational Apps: Incorporate technology by using apps designed to build reading skills through interactive games such as Epic.

Remember, consistency is key. Regular practice at home can significantly enhance your child’s reading abilities.

What Can You Do for Your Multilingual Learner?

Talking about things to do at home but not mentioning those kids who are ESL and MLL would be a disservice. Some things at home you can do to help your child include:

• Listening to Read-Alouds or Audiobooks: This exposes them to fluent reading and helps with language acquisition. A shameless plug is listening to my stories on my YouTube channel, Simply Angeline.
• Using Visual Aids: Incorporate pictures and gestures to support understanding of new vocabulary.
• Encouraging Native Language Use: Strengthening the first language can support second language learning.
• Playing Language Games: Engage in games that build vocabulary and sentence structure in both languages.

A website that is also good is called Games To Learn English. It has various games where students can see a picture, hear the word, and look at the word in the activity. I know this is just scraping the surface for more specific resources for MLL and ESL learners, but I hope to learn and get more and add it to this blog post.

A Better Understanding

I hope the explanation of foundational reading skills and what those skills entail helped someone better identify where their child is and what to do to get them to the next stage. Also, showing strategies on what you can do at home to better support them! If you have any strategies that have helped you along the way, please share them! I would love to hear the great things you are doing!

Until next time!

Angeline

Sources

1. Atlanta Reads. (2013, April). Reading skills pyramid. Retrieved fromhttps://atlantareads.org/2013/04/reading-skills-pyramid/
2. Games to Learn English. (n.d.). Games to Learn English. Retrieved fromhttps://www.gamestolearnenglish.com/
3. Learning A-Z. (n.d.). Foundational skills. Retrieved fromhttps://www.learninga-z.com/site/company/what-we-do/foundational-skills
4. Paths to Literacy. (n.d.). Braille brain: Best practices for foundational skills. Retrieved fromhttps://www.pathstoliteracy.org/braille-brain-best-practices-foundational-skills/
5. com. (n.d.). What is The Reading Pyramid?. Retrieved fromhttps://blog.reading.com/what-is-the-reading-pyramid/
6. This Reading Mama. (n.d.). Printable Phonics Activities. Retrieved fromhttps://thisreadingmama.com/printable-phonics-activities/