During the reading process, your child will have to incorporate several reading strategies and skills.  In the following paragraphs, I have explained some of those essential skills your child needs in order to become a proficient reader.

     Reading comprehension requires motivation, intellectual frameworks for keeping ideas, concentration and good study skills.  Your child should constantly expand his or her background knowledge by reading newspapers, magazines, books and websites on a regular basis.

     Your child should have a good understanding of paragraph structure.  That is, your child should look for opening and closing sentences and supporting details.  Also show your child how to look for transitional words, phrases or paragraphs that change the topic.

    Effective readers try to anticipate the author’s intentions and predict future ideas and questions. This will help your child comprehend all the elements of the story.  In order to understand the storyline, have your child determine how the material organized.  Is it chronological?  Does it have a logical sequence of events?  Are there specific causes and effects?

     Have your child practice the newest reading strategies such as: inferring, making connections, problem and solution, visualization, and determining importance.  These reading strategies are the cornerstone for effective reading skills.

     When reading a non-fiction text, have your child study the pictures, graphs, subheadings, and headings.  These supporting bits of information will help your child see the larger picture.  Make sure your child highlights important information, summarizes it, and then reviews it.  Just reading a book once is not enough. To develop a deeper understanding, you have to highlight, summarize and review important ideas.

     Help your child build a good vocabulary. Make sure your child has the grammatical skills needed to decode words.  Such skills as: understanding root words, prefixes, suffixes, word families, and parts of speech (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives).  You can also have your child read the sentences surrounding the new word. Do the sentences give your child an idea of the meaning of the word? These are called context clues.  It is extremely important to expose your child to vocabulary rich books.  The wider the vocabulary, the more your child will improve his or her reading skills.