Make reading fun by bringing the story's characters to life. Laura Zwickl, Product Training Manager at Learning A-Z, offers lots of great tips and tricks to get students excited about reading over the summer. With the right reading strategies, you can easily build comprehension, fluency, and most importantly, a love of learning.
Hi. My name is Laura Zwickl, and I am a Product Training Manager at Learning A to Z. One thing that I love to do during the summer when reading books is really dive into the characters. For example, if you're reading a book, take a look at the character for a little bit, and think about, what would their voice sound like? What would they be doing? And then read the book using that voice. I love doing that when I do read-alouds with my son, for example; we're reading a book right now where there's a really spooky character, and so we make sure to really lower our voices when we're talking, and we really change our voices, and we really do a lot of different inflections. And it's really fun to bring that book to life when you do that.
All of that is really fun to help build comprehension, to build that love of learning. It also helps with fluency as well, because you're really thinking about the words, thinking about pronunciation. You're thinking about pace, you're thinking about expression. But in the summer, you can find books that your kids really love. So find something that has a character that they can relate to.
Another fun thing to do to build fluency is to do multiple rereads of a book, so same thing -- find a book that your child loves to read, or just have something or a topic that they love; for example, if they love soccer, find a book and read about it, and read it many times. You'll find your child will get much more used to reading the books, the pace of the sentences, how to pronounce the words. They'll get more comfortable, and then they can even pronounce things like "goal" at the end, and say, "G O A L!" It's a really fun way to just build that love of reading as well.
