Save the best books and read them aloud. Bring the lovely, exciting stories to life. Challenge your kids to listen to stories that boost their vocabulary. Listening to someone reading book with challenging ideas and vocabulary is not only a wonderful way to spend time together, it is way to ensure that kids learn to follow ideas in complex texts.
Books that are more advanced than kids can read on their own prepares them to engage in difficult ideas. Learning to effectively decode words is something that requires lots of practice and reading books over and over again can help to develop both confidence and fluency. Books with less challenging ideas and more limited vocabulary helps a kid to fous on the decoding.
Much attention is often focused on supporting a child when they are learning to decode. Yet, many children never learn to follow more complex ideas. As a result many of these children struggle with reading in the higher grades and more importantly they may never develop a love for reading exciting books - fiction as well as non-fiction.
Knowing vocabulary that is more complex will later help to push the bar of what a kid can read on his own.
It may be tempting to make reading easier. The underlying idea that kids will read is the books are easy and appealing, and challenging vocabulary and ideas will drive them away. Many schools ask a child to avoid a book where there is more than five words on the page that they do not know.
By reading aloud you can stop and discuss words, you can explore tricky topics and ideas.Reading a book is a conversation, usually a conversation with yourself. But by reading aloud, a kid has someone else to explore ideas and thoughts with. Think dive, stop and reflect on the characters, what they are doing. Explore what might happen on the next page. Enjoy the reading journey.
Have you ever tired to read Charles Dickens?
Long, long, sentences filled with descriptions of characters. If a kid is ever going even try reading some of the old literary masters, as well as modern masterpieces, we need to prepare them. I love reading challenging books about astronomy and philosophy. Many of the ideas are indeed complex and the pages are filled with words that I have a vague idea of what they mean. But that does not matter. I learn and grow in my knowledge each time.
Deciphering complex and unusual sentence structures can be hard work. Hearing someone read aloud helps to familiarise a kid with different syntax, which will help them later when they meet a similar structure on their own. It is also a great idea to read a book aloud and them let the kid read the book all by themselves a couple of months or even a year later.
Exciting, mind-boggling books can be read many times.
