How to make our children with learning difficulties read for fun!
Dear Parents and Teachers,
Most of the children with learning difficulties (LD) struggle in reading and don’t develop reading as a hobby.
All their struggles in vocablary, comprehention, sentence formation, imagination, general awreness and composition skills could be taken care of, if they develop habit of reading.
Parents can motivate children to read
1. By modelling what we expect children to do. You can give your TV some rest and start reading soemthing for yourself. Start with something light if reading does not come to you naturally. Sudha Murthy, Chetan Bhagat could be your first authors. Find time to read. Children see what you do very carefully, believe me!
2. You can read bedtime stories to your children of any age. While reading out loud for them do ‘dramatic reading’ which makes the story more interesting and teaches children rules of punctuation. If you are reading something and come across something interesting, read it out loud for your children.
3. Take children to liabraries and book shops like crossword and let them “window shop”. These shops encourage reading on their floors. Let child read two comic books there only and buy third for home reading.
4. Start a “book club” with other parents. Where children can come together, talk about books, exchange books.
5. If your child has read a book and a movie version of the same comes, take your child to watch it. Discuss what he enjoyed more, the book or the movie? Why?
The below document can help children to kich start the reading. With the help of these guidelines, they might start reading unwillingly but slowly they will start their journey towards “passionate reading.”
How to read a book
(Which is not your text book)
Dear Children,
Grab a 'cool' looking book. We are planing to read it. Please follow the guidelines given below
1. First read the title & look at the cover picture. What does these two things tell us ?
What’s this book about, will it be a good read ?
Any suggestions from you to the author ? ( About the cover )
What is on the back cover of the book ?
(Sometimes the back cover talks about the book itself or talks about other publications.)
2. Are there any other interesting facts about the book in next 2,3 pages.
3. What do you think of the index...
4. Now see how thick the book is ?
How many pages? How many pictures?
How much time it will take you to read it? (Predict it realistically)
(If the book looks too thick. Think “it’s a dare! I can read it.”)
5. Try to read the book from beginning to end. It’s nice to follow this route, otherwise we might not enjoy the book as much as we should. Read 1st chapter & decide whether you want to read the book.
6. Make a nice “Book Mark” for yourself which helps you to stay on the right page.
7. Read paragraph & while reading:
Think, What is this paragraph telling me about? What are the meanings of words, I am not aware of? Can I guess their meanings based on the context or do I need to look them up in dictionary? (or google it with parent’s permission)
8. Is this story/ information similar to..
Something I have read before
Something I have heard/seen before
Something I have experienced before
Something I have imagined before
Try to make these connections.
9. If you start reading after some gap and if you find it difficult to reconnect to what you were reading. Read a page before that..... suddenly it will come back to you!
10. Even if you are reading silently, in your mind, remember to .........
- Laugh when you read something funny
- Cry a little (feel sad) when you read something sad.
- Share something nice/new you read with your parents, friends,teachers.
- Let the story carry you in the land of imagination, picture, the scences of story, make a “mind movie” about the story.
11. Once you finish the book. Pat yourself for this! Bravo! You finished the book.
- How did you do about the speed? Did you finish in predicted time?
- What other books can you read on similar topic?
- Would you like to read more books from this author?
- Tell your friends why you like this book and recommend the book to them.
Books are our friends. Lets enjoy them.
Happy Reading!
