4 Easy Activities to

Improve Reading Skills Part 2

As a parent you do have the power and ability to help your kids improve reading skills. Now what I mean here is that you as a parent can help your child whether they have an identified learning disability, dyslexia, ADHD, or are gifted. There are 4 easy to implement activities that each take just a few minutes a day to improve reading skills.

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

My last post 4 Easy Activities to Improve Reading Skills (Part 1) talked about the first activity you can do to help your child – reading fluency. Today I’m going to talk about the second activity which is helping your children improve their reading – and that is by helping them with their spelling skills.

Improve Reading Skills – Spelling

So, the second of the 4 easy to implement activities to help your child improve their reading and writing skills is spelling. One aspect of reading is called decoding – the ability to sound out words. Another aspect is called encoding – the ability to spell the words you hear. Being a successful speller impacts your writing. Everyone actually knows the words you are writing because they are spelled correctly.

So many kids struggle with improving reading skills and spelling and they don’t need to! Now I’m not talking only about children with LD or dyslexia or ADHD. Even gifted children often struggle with spelling. Spelling really doesn’t have to be so hard! If you understand that we just put letters together 8 ways to make words, spelling becomes easy. Spelling becomes easy for everyone, even children and adults with LD, dyslexia, or ADHD.

The majority of words use the most common vowel pattern which is the vowel consonant pattern. Just learning this pattern alone will help your child improve their spelling because so many one syllable and multi-syllable words have at least one syllable in them that follows this spelling pattern.

Improve Reading Skills Example

For example, the word example has 3 syllables. The first syllable, ex is a vowel consonant pattern, the second syllable, am is also a vowel consonant pattern. Only the third syllable is a different pattern. The last syllable, the ple is the consonant + le spelling pattern. I explain that when you have an le at the end of a two or three syllable word, it grabs the consonant in front of it to form the syllable. I even grab their arm saying the le grabs the consonant in front of it like in table, purple, people, and example. Doing this body movement helps this pattern sink in to kids and they ‘get it.’

For more information on how to improve reading skills as well as spelling, see Making Spelling Sense. Making Spelling Sense teaches the 8 ways we put letters together to make words – the 8 spelling patterns with an auditory, visual, and tactile method. This special method is what really makes the difference because it addresses the underlying causes of spelling problems and at the same time it teaches the structure of the language and how to spell thousands of words.