Parent & Child Activities
Some factors in life are harder to control. Some factors may also cause negative effects in a child’s education, without the parent ever realizing it. Factors like socioeconomic class, family size, and parental education has influence over the child’s education. And although are not guaranteed to be negative factors, it makes certain aspects harder. But, to balance out the struggles that may come with it, parents showing interest in their child’s educational journey has a much more significant influence on the child’s education than any other factor. Reading is the most affected subject to parental influence. Parental influence in their children’s academics usually looks like motivation, discipline, and support. The Path to Literacy is inspired by three activities that parents can do with their child. After your child is done reading, take some time to engage and show interest in your child’s journey using these activities.
Speed rounds
Speed rounds is an exploration activity, where children will read just the first chapter of a book. Traditionally, the books will be set up in literary stations, typically by genre. The child will move around to different stations and explore with the first chapter of a book. This takes off the pressure to read and allows the children to become more explorative. Reading stations can also help children reflect on what to read next. Whether they liked a certain genre or story introduction in one book versus another. Choice and autonomy is highlighted in exploratory activities. To simulate reading stations on The Path to Literacy, you may filter the books by genre and allow for your child to explore the books within. Then at another time, switch the genre.
Dialogic Reading Prompts
Dialogic reading prompts are open-ended questions that the parent will ask their child whilst reading together. A parent shows interest and builds cooperation with their child by considering the child’s point of view. To which children will be more on task and cooperative when reading. Just by asking your child “What is happening here?”, “What do you think will happen next?”, “What’s the name of this?”, “Have you ever seen a…?” will engage them further with the text. Dialogic reading prompts may also be done after the child is done indecently reading, but is best done while reading together.
Book Talk
Book talks are conversations with the author’s name, genre, synopsis, point of interest, and who else might enjoy reading the text, to a book that the child selected themselves. This exercise pertains to teaching the child what choice is, how to use their choice as a benefit to themselves, and how to apply their decision making skills. By choosing their own book and speaking about it, this lets the child discover if a book that they chose fit their interests or if they’d like to make a different choice. As this is continuously practiced, comparisons between other books will be easier. So the child can compare one book they chose before versus what was better or worse about the current book. On The Path to Literacy, certain keywords are in the description of the books, so a child can understand some of the themes present in the book, which can be brought up during book talk. Talk with your child for at least 10 minutes about the book of their choice.
The Path to Literacy 