Home Reading Tips

In order for kids to make gains in their reading and really excel, they need to experience reading not just at school, but at home as well. Home reading reinforces all the great reading skills kids pick up at school, and cements them in their memory.

Home reading takes a couple different forms. One is the reading that kids do in the home readers they bring home from school, which are based on a guided reading level. The home readers allow kids to take part in guided reading while at home. Guided reading is an activity that educators believe children should do everyday in order for kids to get the most out of reading instruction. By engaging in a guided reading activity, such as home readers with parents, children are able to work on the key areas of literacy instruction that they would be receiving at school. They may be concentrating on particular sounds, letter or words, or particular reading skills, and home reading reinforces the child’s learning.

A great way to supplement all the work that kids do at school is by participating in an online reading program like Reading Eggs, which is a great way to do home reading. The goal of any reading instruction is to build reading comprehension and fluency in a child’s reading. Teachers and parents, of course, want children to read well, and in so doing, understand what they read. There are five essential elements of any good reading program:

• Phonemic awareness

• Phonics skills

• Fluency in reading

• Vocabulary building

• Text comprehension

These five elements are essential to any effective means of reading instruction, and home reading is an essential part of any good reading program. The Reading Eggs program allows students to participate in guided, interactive reading lessons and games, accessible online at both school and home.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

Reading texts on their own level allows students to use and develop their phonemic awareness (their understanding that words are made up of smaller units of sound) and their knowledge of phonics (that small units of sound directly relate to individual or small groupings of letters) within the context of real texts. Researchers are quick to state that phonics instruction and phonemic awareness are not terribly effective when isolated from reading. Reading texts that relate to recent phonics instruction and/or recently acquired phonemic awareness help to instill this knowledge.

Reading Eggs uses a comprehensive phonics and phonemic awareness program that offers instruction within both of these key literacy areas, but also places these skills within the context of reading real texts. By Lesson 9, students are reading their first book. All the books in the first 60 lessons are easily decodable and pitched right at the early reader’s level, and provide students with on-level reading material where they can practice the skills learned in each lesson. All the words they encounter in the reading books have been introduced and reinforced within the Reading Eggs lessons. And this is reading that kids can do anywhere, at school or at home.

Fluency

Guided home reading allows for explicit instruction in fluency. The chosen text is matched to a child’s reading ability, so that the student can confidently read most of the text. Where there are unknown words, the student is able to use recently acquired, or current knowledge of phonics and phonemes to work out the sound of the word. By understanding the surrounding text, the student is then able to put the word in its context and gather the meaning from its place within the larger text. In a classroom setting, the teacher is able to model fluent reading for the unfamiliar parts of a text, or praise the fluent reading that the student demonstrates. The markers of fluency are not just reading fast, on the contrary, it is more about the markers of reading that demonstrate understanding, such as pausing, phrasing, intonation, word stress, and rate.

The Reading Eggs online Story Books reinforce the skills learned in the previous lesson(s) with a story that makes sense and is created using matching high-quality, full-colour illustrations. These real books are read aloud by the narrator who models fluent reading to the child. The child can read along with the voice, and the audio can then be turned off for the child to reread the book independently. These books enhance the student’s experience, motivation, and above all, level of achievement, as the learning is placed in the context of reading a book that is at that child’s reading level and is interesting to look at and to read.

Vocabulary

Home reading provides daily opportunities to expand vocabulary through reading, conversation and explicit instruction.

The Reading Eggs program accommodates children with a wide range of abilities, including children with more limited vocabularies. The Reading Eggs program assists with vocabulary development by ensuring that all content area words are introduced with visual support, such as a matching picture, which provides context and increases word knowledge and word retention.

Much vocabulary is acquired by reading a wide variety of texts, and reading storybooks is one of the most powerful means to expand vocabulary. The Reading Eggs lessons contain more than 100 e-books, offering students almost a limitless array of texts to read.

Text Comprehension

In order to efficiently read and understand text, readers need exposure to a wide variety of texts. Text comprehension relates both to the understanding of the content of a text as well as understanding what kind of text they are reading. Readers must learn how to adjust to the different types of text they read, and the only way that they are going to learn how to accommodate a variety of texts, is by actually reading a wide variety of texts.

Reading Eggs offers students a suite of instructional materials in an engaging and rich learning environment. Each lesson is presented in the same structure: an introductory instructional animation, followed by a series of activities that build word knowledge and automaticity. The student then gets to progress to the reading of a new book, which could either be an alphabet book, a story or a nonfiction title. This structure highlights the importance of reading extended meaningful text.

Reading Eggs provides great reading activities that kids can take part in at home or school. As Reading Eggs is based on current literacy research, it integrates seamlessly with school-based literacy programs.

The Reading Eggs program provides exceptional reading activities that kids can do either at school or at home. Reading Eggs is committed to home reading and encourages parental involvement. Parental involvement improves student learning outcomes and achievement. Reading Eggs provides continual feedback to parents about their child’s progress, which makes it easy for parents to be involved.

Testimonials

Thank you Reading Eggs for a brilliant program. My son is 9-years-old with the reading ability of a 5-year-old. I have purchased the book packs and the activity books and he is coming on well. Thank you for a wonderful program.

- Michelle

Reading Eggs is an absolutely fantastic reading resource! Students jump at the chance to read with Reggie and his friends on a daily basis. With the availability of home access, Reading Eggs provides a new and exciting twist on the concept of home reading. Reading Eggs is the whole package!

- Valerie McKelvie, Matong PS