Reading is an essential skill that lays the foundation for a child’s academic success and lifelong learning. As parents and teachers, we have the remarkable opportunity to empower children with the tools they need to become confident and fluent readers. See these effective reading strategies below for helping children learn to read by incorporating phonics, sight words, and reading comprehension techniques. Encourage a love for reading with fun and engaging reading activities that build foundational reading skills.
The printable worksheets, reading activities, and hands-on projects in this blog post can be found in Evan-Moor’s TeacherFileBox, an online lesson library that provides a comprehensive reading resource.
Phonemic Awareness and Reading Activities for Kids
Phonics is a method that teaches the relationship between sounds and the written letters or groups of letters that represent them. Phonics helps children learn how to decode words, which leads to improved reading fluency. Below are some tips for incorporating phonics into your reading instruction.
If children are just starting to learn to read, start with letter recognition. Introduce each letter of the alphabet, helping children associate the sound with its corresponding symbol.
- Letter Recognition: An alphabet hunt is a fun and interactive way to teach letter and sound combinations. For beginning readers, match objects that start with the same letter and sound.
- Phonemic Awareness Activities: Phonemic awareness activities are a great way to engage children in fun phonics activities that focus on identifying individual sounds in words. Rhyming games that practice blending sounds and segmenting words help children learn to identify letter and sound relationships. Gather sets of rhyming objects to play the game “rhyme in a bag.” Split the sets, so half are placed in a paper bag and half are placed on a table. Have students reach into the bag, pull out an object, and match it to an item on the table that rhymes.
- Phonics Games and Resources: Phonics-based reading activities and games help to reinforce important letter and sound relationships. Browse Best Phonics Printables to Help Children Learn to Read for more phonics activities and lesson ideas!
Sight Words: Rapid Word Recognition
Sight words, also known as high-frequency words, are words that appear frequently in texts and do not follow regular phonetic patterns. Mastery of sight words is crucial for fluent reading and comprehension. Consider these activities to help children learn sight words effectively.
Sight-Word Concentration Game: This fun sight-word game from TeacherFileBox printables focuses on matching high-frequency words (sight words) on a game board.
Word Machines for Sight Words: These fun sight-word activities from TeacherFileBox instruct children to create a word machine to help them practice and remember important sight words.
Word Scavenger Hunt: Hide word cards or objects with printed words around the room or outdoors. Provide children with a list of words to find. As they locate the words, they can read them aloud or match them to corresponding pictures.
Sight-Word Relay Writing: Divide children into teams and set up a whiteboard or a large piece of paper for each team. Call out a sight word, and one member from each team races to write the word on their team’s whiteboard. The first team to correctly write the word scores a point. This game reinforces spelling and recognition of sight words.
Browse Sight Words: Unlocking Reading Success for more engaging activities and lessons!
Developing Reading Comprehension Skills in Children
Reading comprehension goes beyond word recognition. It involves understanding the meaning, making connections, and drawing inferences from the text. Reading comprehension is directly linked to reading fluency. After reading fluency is established, reading comprehension begins with children’s ability to plan, check, and adjust their understanding while in the learning process. Explicit teaching of reading comprehension strategies will improve children’s ability to monitor their own understanding as they read. Here are some strategies to enhance reading comprehension skills:
- Make connections: When we make connections between new learning and previous experiences, our brains make stronger links in our learning over time. Some questions to ask are:
- What does this story remind you of?
- How is this similar to other stories you have read?
- Can you relate to the characters in this story?
- Can the events in this story happen in the real world?
- Ask questions: Part of developing children’s reading comprehension is teaching them to ask themselves questions as they read. Start this habit early by asking children questions about what he or she is reading. Begin by reading aloud and asking questions about the story. A few examples are:
- What do you think?
- Why do you think the character did that?
- What do you think will happen?
- Ask what is important (narrow down the details of the text):
- What is the topic of this story or text?
- What are the details in the text?
- What are the details in the text mostly about?
- Monitor Comprehension: There are many different techniques for monitoring reading comprehension. Incorporate a few into reading routines.
- reading aloud
- rereading texts
- reading slower
- identifying confusing words
- Provide the right types of books
Choose books that are within each child’s reading level and ability. If the reading text is too difficult, children will spend most of their brain power decoding new words and not remember or understand what they read. If you don’t know how to make sure your child is reading books within his or her reading level, try the five-finger rule.
- Choose a book.
- Have the child read the second page.
- Hold up a finger for each word the child doesn’t know.
- If there are five or more words the child doesn’t know, choose an easier book.
The most important thing to do to improve reading comprehension is to read consistently throughout the week. Practice is an essential part of children’s word recall and understanding. The more words children can read with ease, the easier it will be to understand the content of what he or she is reading.
Browse Personalize Reading Instruction with TeacherFileBox Printables for more tips and activities to help children develop reading comprehension.
Reading Games and Activities for Kids
Engaging children in literacy games is an excellent way to make learning fun and interactive. These hands-on reading games, reading centers and active reading activities are great for kinesthetic learners and make reading interactive and enjoyable.
Word Building with Manipulatives: Provide students with manipulatives like magnetic letters, letter tiles, or foam letters to build words. Encourage them to manipulate the letters, blend sounds, and create new words. This hands-on approach strengthens phonics skills, word recognition, and spelling abilities.
Book-Based Art Projects:
Extend the reading experience by incorporating art activities inspired by books. Encourage students to create illustrations, dioramas, or crafts related to the stories they’ve read. This not only reinforces comprehension but also encourages creativity and self-expression. These activities from TeacherFileBox printables include fun, hands-on book reports!
Reading Center Activities
Phonics Games Syllable Count Game for 6 Players: This colorful and fun game is a great way to have children practice syllable counting.
Take It to Your Seat Literacy Centers Get to the Root of It: Practice identifying root words with the colorful reading center activity.
Hands-on Sequencing Activities
These short story sequencing activities from TeacherFileBox printables is a fun way to have children show the order of events in a story.
For more reading games and activities, checkout Hands-On Reading Games and Activities for Kids.
Building Reading Fluency
Reading fluency refers to the ability to read text with speed, accuracy, and prosody (expression and phrasing). Fluent readers can decode words quickly and automatically, enabling them to comprehend the meaning of the text more efficiently. Fluency involves smooth and natural reading, with appropriate emphasis, pauses, and intonation, and it plays a significant role in reading comprehension. When students can read with fluency, their cognitive resources are freed up to focus on understanding and making connections within the text.
Ways to increase fluency:
- Phonics (letter and sound rules)
- Phoneme awareness (blending and separating sounds)
- Phonic word patterns such as oy, ow, ou, sh, ch
- Appropriate pronunciation
- Repeated readings (reread books)
- Choral reading (read aloud together)
These Building Reading Fluency Passages from TeacherFileBox printables are a great way to expose children to new words and texts!
Reading Fluency Recommendations
A words-per-minute grade level chart is an easy way to see at a glance the most common fluency reading levels for each grade. Remember, accuracy and reflection are the main emphasis when looking at the number of words read per minute.
Listed below are reading level recommendations for students to read grade-level-appropriate texts by the end of the year. Experts’ opinions vary, but these are some good baselines to monitor your child’s fluency.
Keep in mind that a reading words-per-minute grade level chart is a simple gauge and just one measurement tool used to identify students’ readiness. Every student learns in a unique way, at his or her own pace. If your child is not at grade level, focus on increasing his or her current score by 10 to 15 words by the end of the year, and then celebrate your child’s successes!
Browse A Guide to Reading Fluency: How Many Words Per Minute Should Children Read? for more tips and activities to help children develop reading comprehension.
By combining fun games, engaging phonics instruction, sight-word recognition, and reading comprehension strategies, children can develop important skills for reading success. Reading has the ability to open the doors to a world of imagination, knowledge, and endless possibilities!
Evan-Moor’s TeacherFileBox printables are a great tool to help children learn to read. The diverse reading activities and games provide engaging reading experiences for kids. With thousands of reading activities, parents and teachers can create a reading curriculum around every child’s abilities and interests.
With over 80,000 lesson units available across PreK–6 grades, TeacherFileBox makes it easy to build your reading curriculum. In addition to reading lessons, TeacherFileBox also includes lesson units across the curriculum for grades PreK–6 in math, language, writing, science, geography, social studies, STEM/STEAM, SEL, and more! Save your favorite printables in your personal account—and print lessons, project them onto a screen, or share lessons in your Google Classroom!
Try TeacherFileBox for free for 14 days and browse reading printables and activity ideas.
Heather Foudy is a certified elementary teacher with over 7 years’ experience as an educator and volunteer in the classroom. She enjoys creating lessons that are meaningful and creative for students. She is currently working for Evan-Moor’s marketing and communications team and enjoys building learning opportunities that are both meaningful and creative for students and teachers alike.
Alphabet Hunt: An alphabet hunt is a fun and interactive way to teach letter and sound combinations. For beginning readers, matching objects with the same beginning and ending sounds reinforces this concept. Assign a letter of the week and have students find objects within the classroom that have the same beginning sound as the weekly letter. Depending on your class, you could assign more than one letter per week. (Students could also bring objects from home to share as well.)
Rhyming Phonics Game: Gather sets of rhyming objects to play the game “rhyme in a bag.” Split the sets, so half are placed in a paper bag and half are placed on a table. Have students reach into the bag, pull out an object, and match it to an item on the table that rhymes.
To make a blending flip book:
To make a word-family flip book:
Incorporate
