Benefits of Reading Aloud to Children

Every time you read aloud to students, you are modeling good reading skills. From fluency to voice inflection, it is important for students to hear good reading so that they can imitate it in their own reading. Specifically, reading aloud to students: Provides motivation for reading and learning. By listening to a strong reader model the enjoyment of reading, students will become more motivated for their own reading and learning. Helps build background knowledge. One of the things that stru...

 Tips for Parents to Encourage Reading

Read to your child. Try to read to your child every day. Read from a wide variety of materials and books. Encourage writing. Encourage your child to scribble and pretend write if they are young. Encourage older children to write stories and letters and share them with the family. Have writing materials readily available. Have reading material at home. Have a wide variety of books, children's magazines, and newspapers available for children to read or look at. Get your child a libr...

 Schemata

Not only does background knowledge grow in the brains of our students through their experiences, but the vocabulary words that are stored as a result of such experiences provide avenues to comprehend the curriculum from the text, as well as lecture and discussion. We can look at the work of Piaget (1970), who concluded that we organize information in our brains in the form of a schema, a representation of concepts, ideas, and actions that are related. Schemata (the plural of schema) are form...

 Reading Awareness Goals in Young Children

Early childhood. The foundation for reading success is formed long before a child reaches first grade. Parents, care providers, and other community members should give children a strong base of cognitive skills related to print, background knowledge, and a love of books starting at infancy By the end of kindergarten, children should have: a great deal of experience with children’s literature; language skills that allow them to describe their experiences; familiarity with the alphabet; and th...

 What Students Should Develop During Pre-K and Kindergarten

Language skills At entry to first grade, students will need to have had a broad array of language experiences. Oral language, vocabulary, and other language concepts are crucial foundations for success in reading, especially reading comprehension. In particular, children need to be able to use language to describe their experiences, to predict what will happen in the future, and to talk about events that happened in the past. Early childhood programs can develop children's language by givin...