1. Read to them every day.
2. Give plenty of love and encouragement.
3. Select one simple objective for writing, reading, spelling, or handwriting at a time and stick with it until your children master it.
4. Talk with your children and explain things to them.
5. Use new words in familiar contexts. Kids are masters at picking up contexts, nuances and tones that adults use to express precise ideas. They assimilate new vocabulary and new ideas this way.
6. Listen to your children. Find out what they know about something and use it to introduce similar or even opposite points of view.
7. Be patient. Remember that your children are still learning and practicing their skills.
8. Be proud of their skills and show it. If your children know that you are confident in their language skills, they will be too.
9. Be a good role model for your children. Let them catch you reading and talking about what you've read with others.
10. Encourage thinking and not just recall. Ask questions from their reading that require consideration, reason, and good old guesswork.
11. With early elementary-aged kids, play games that foster English skills, such as identifying certain phonetic sounds, picking out spelling patterns, counting, looking for colors or letters, sorting, guessing, clapping when they hear the rhyme in a poem, etc. (See Writing Strands 1 for more ideas like this.)
12. Create a safe atmosphere for error. Do not ridicule your children or let anyone else ridicule them for something they are struggling to learn.
13. Reward diligence. Praise your children for their efforts and let them know that it is noble to persevere, even if it takes a long time to learn something new.
14. Model the structure of thought. Talk with your children about your plans for the day - what you will do first, second, third, etc. Talk about why you keep certain things together in the house. Let them see the organization of daily life. It will translate into their writing.
15. Read to your children daily! This is so important that it bears repeating. From pre-k through middle school, children develop linguistic structure, and reading establishes the model for this structure.
Posts
