10 Tips for Successful Bedtime Reading with Your Child

Reading with your child can be so beneficial for your child’s academic, social, and emotional growth. When you read with your child you open up opportunities to talk to them about their interests, thoughts, and feelings about situations, characters, and outcomes. Reading with your child provides a powerful setting to use academic language when talking about the book’s title, the author, the illustrator, the problem and solution, the setting and characters. As you read with your child, you model fluent reading and comprehension.

In order to make the most of this time together, here are a few tips:

 

1. Select stories both you and your child will enjoy.

The more you and your child enjoy the story or the topic, the more likely your child is to pay attention to the reading and share their thoughts about the book. Think about choosing books about your child’s favorite hobby or sport, include silly rhymes, chants, and tounge twisters for extra fun.

2. Select a specific time each night to read with your child.

Choose a time when there will be less distractions (if at all possible). Setting aside a particular time will help your child understand and appreciate the importance of reading regularly. Having a set time also increases the likelihood that you will have time to read. When schedules get hectic or the bed time routine starts later than normal, if reading is part of your regular routine, you will be more likely to fit it in.

3. Make your reading sound like a storyteller when you are reading fiction and sound like an expert when you read informational texts.

Your child will delight in hearing words “come to life” and this models excellent oral reading for your child. Depending on the text, you can even take turns reading different parts, or invite your child to act out each role as you share stories aloud.

4. Encourage your child to predict what comes next by looking at pictures or listening to word clues.

If your child is reading chapter books or books in a series, ask them to make predictions based on how the characters typically act or make predictions based on other books in the series.

5. Give your child sufficient time to figure out unfamiliar words when they are reading aloud.

While it may feel like forever as you wait, providing this time is so important for the child so they can think about all of the information they can use to figure out the word. See the post about Guess the Covered Word to learn more about how to encourage your child to use more information when figuring out a tricky word. If your child gets stuck, offer hints and suggestions before saying the word.

Some things you could draw their attention to:

looking at the first and final consonant sounds,

trying short vowel sounds before using long ones,

looking at other words in the sentence to see what makes sense.

6. Be patient and supportive while your child reads. Allow time for him or her to self-correct and reread mispronounced words. Oftentimes, children will recognize mistakes as they continue to read the rest of the sentence.

7. Ask your child what they would change about the book or how they would continue the story. Continue to ask them questions such as:

“Why?”

“How would that change the problem or the solution in the story?”

“How would that affect (character’s name)?

8.Point out and review phonetically-irregular words that do not follow conventional pronunciation, such as two, was, or enough.

Have your child practice, memorize, and identify irregular words in context. These words are often on high frequency word lists. See our post about high frequency words for some engaging activities for practicing high frequency words.

9. For younger readers, point out letter sounds in words and words with similar letter patterns (flow-er, pow-er) as you read.

Point out words that have a specific sound, such as those that begin with the /t/ sound.

Ask your child to say the rhyming words out loud as you point to the words in the story.

Have your child think of additional words with the same sound patterns.

10. Ask your child if they enjoyed the book and why or why not.

Getting a child to talk about a book can greatly improve their comprehension and it is a great way to learn more about their interests.

We hope you find these tips helpful in establishing or refining reading habits. We strive to read to our children every night. I will be honest that there are some nights it doesn’t happen but for the most part, we have made it a habit and our children know that they need to pick a book for us to read together before they get in bed.