Improve Reading Skills Part 4 – Writing

As a parent you have a large responsibility. You need to not only care for your child, you also need to watch over their education and be sure they learn with ease. Reading, writing, and spelling can be difficult for many kids. But as a parent, you do have the power and ability to help your kids improve reading, writing, and spelling skills. Now what I mean here is that you as a parent can help your child improve reading skills whether they have an identified learning disability, dyslexia, ADHD, are falling through the cracks or are gifted.

4 Easy to Implement Activities to Improve Reading Skills

Their are 4 easy to implement activities that each take just a few minutes a day to improve reading.

1. Improve reading fluency in 5 minutes a day
2. Improve spelling and learn the 8 ways we put letters together to make words
3. Improve reading comprehension by playing a reading comprehension game
4. Improve writing skills using specially designed graphic organizers

I’ve already talked about how you can help your child improve their reading fluency in just minutes a day. I’ve already talked about how you can help your child improve their spelling skills in just minutes a day. And, I’ve talked about how you can help your child improve their reading comprehension by playing a game with them. so, today I’m going to talk about the fourth activity which is helping your children improve their reading – and that is by helping them with their writing skills.

The 4th Activity to Improve Reading Skills

The fourth activity to help your kids improve reading skills is to help your kids learn how to take notes with the graphic organizers found in Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills. These fill-in-the-blank graphic organizers make note-taking, paragraph writing, and essay writing easy. As a parent, I hated watching my son struggle with a writing assignment. I’m sure you feel the same way.

One of the best things I found to do to make this note-taking and paragraph writing or even essay writing easier was to create graphic organizers that were easy for him to fill in. Then he wasn’t staring at a blank sheet of paper anymore. It was so much easier for him to fill in the blanks and within about 10 minutes he’d have his notes done. His life became easier and my life became easier too. We didn’t have the ‘homework wars’ going on anymore.

You know, I’ve had students bring me their notes over the years that they had done in class when they needed help writing their paper from them. The sad thing was, they couldn’t make heads or tails out of their notes even though they used a ‘webbing’ system when they did them.

The notes were just too hard for them to follow. That is why I created the graphic organizers the way I did, so students whether they had perception problems or not would be able to utilize the notes they took. It isn’t enough to take the notes. You need to be able to utilize them after you’ve taken them.

Donna Walker Tileston, author of What Every Teacher Should Know About the Brain states, “Approximately 87% of learners either need to see the learning or do something with it. Using visuals with the learning will help students take in the information more efficiently, but even more important, it helps them to develop their own methods for organizing content.”

Using pictographs, charts and graphs, graphic organizers, and note-taking models is the way to do this. So, give the graphic organizers from Ten Minutes to Better Study Skills a try. I created them in such a way that once he filled them out he’d actually be able to use them for study guides or for help in turning notes into paragraphs or rough drafts into final copies.