Parents Can Support Reading Skills

In an article from the Winter 2011, Instructor magazine, the authors give ideas on how to get parents on board with supporting reading skills. Below are suggestions from that article.


Parents want to help with reading, but sometimes barriers may exist:
-Long work days
-The ghost of their own school failures
-Insecurities with English
-Not knowing other parents or teachers at the school that can help
-The attitude that the teacher is the one expected to take care of school issues
-Parents not understanding how to use phonics and the only focusing on correcting of individual words, which discourages the child

What can parents do?
-Try seeing reading with new eyes
-Encourage your children as they discover how reading works
-Get read-alouds for your child which are available from the library
-If you don’t read English well, use emergent readers written in your home language
-Get comfortable meeting your child’s teacher and other parents
-Ask someone to go with you until you to any meetings until you are comfortable

Deborah Corpus and Ann Giddings suggest the following titles to help you as parents assist your children in having a lifelong love for reading.

Below are some favorite books that have help in working with parents and reading.
1. The Read-Aloud Handbook, By Jim Trelease
2. Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parent’s Guide, By Lucy Calkins
3. Reading Begins at Home, By Dorothy Butler and Marie Clay
4. The Partners’ Handbook, By Debby Charna and Wendy Rosush Reading at Home