How to Help Your Children Improve Their Reading Skills

Kemarin, Jumat 5 Desember 2008, aku diundang oleh EF Pamulang, sebuah lembaga dimana anak-anakku belajar Bahasa Inggris untuk mengikuti program mereka yaitu Life Club for Parents, sebuah pertemuan untuk para orangtua peserta kursus Bahasa Inggris di EF. Undangannya sudah diberikan sejak 2 minggu sebelumnya, tapi aku waktu itu belum bisa memastikan bisa datang atau tidak. But at the last minute, I decided to join the meeting .

Pembicaranya adalah the DOS (Director of School) EF Pamulang yaitu Ms. Nicole dibantu oleh salah satu staf dari perusahaan yang memayungi EF Pamulang.

Ga nyesel ternyata datang ke pertemuan itu karena banyak banget ilmu yang bisa aku dapat dan mudah-mudahan bisa juga dipraktekkan kepada anak-anakku.

The meeting was a Presentation about "How to Help Children Improve Their Reading Skills" . Aku coba share di sini sekarang ya...

First of all, it is important to know Why do people read? The parents were asked and some of them answered to get informations, to know how to, to gain knowledge, to stimulate your mind and sometimes to escape reality or for pleasure and to have fun in reading and it is not to answer comprehension questions (except in exams, of course) or to do a test at the end.

Then there are Methods for Reading such as Predict: before we read a book, usually we see the cover of the book, right? So, from the cover of the book, we can ask our children to predict or to guess what's the book about, who or what the characters are, what will happen in the story, etc. There's no wrong answer here. Hopefully, by this, our children will be interested and eager to read the book we offer them. Then Visualize: by reading a book, especially a book without pictures we can visualize everything written in a book and ask our children to imagine and say what they are visualizing when they are reading that book. Again, there should be no wrong answers here and let them imagine and visualize freely. The next method is Ask Questions: ask our children what will the story tell you, what can you get from the story or do you want to be the character in the story, etc. Here also, there is no wrong answers. Then Read: start reading and you don't need to push your children to finish the book. Because if you do and they find out that actually they don't like the book, the next time they will be afraid to start reading any books. After your children finish reading their book you can Discuss: ask your children to say anything they like about the book. Of course there is also no wrong answers here.

In reading English books (as 2nd languange, off course), the first step that we have to do is Learn How to Sound Out Words: ask your children to sound out the words they read in the book, so they will be able to pronounce the words in the right way. But, sometimes for children (or maybe we, adults also) to read English words as our 2nd language is quite difficult, especially for long words. For example: intimidated. So, to read that kind of word, we can try to divide them into syllables, that is Read Phonetically: divide it into syllables like in-tim-i-dat-ed. So our children (or maybe we) won't be afraid to read that kind of word. Then, Learn Word Collocations and Lexical Chunks: word collocations are the words that are 'glued together' in our minds and they made up a compound noun. The examples of word collocations are crystal clear, cellular phone, laptop computer or cosmetic surgery. Lexical Chunks are single words or words that are grouped in a language's lexicon. The examples are cat, tree, traffic light, by the way, once upon a time and take care of. Then Say it Out-loud: say the words out-loud to learn the right pronounciation. After that, Guess the Meaning: instead of using dictionary, ask our children to guess the meaning of the word by reading the context of the sentence. For example: I rode a roller coaster and after that I got disorientated. I did'nt know which way to go. Our children maybe don't know the meaning of disorientated, so by reading the next sentence, ask them to guess. They probably will answer lost ways, get dizzy, etc. Those are fine. Just let them guess. But it is not prohibited, though, to Use Dictionary to find out the meaning of English words.

The benefits of reading are:

1. Reading helps writing.
2. Writing is a great way to let children be creative.
3. Controlling your own language. You can easily convert to your own languange (your 1st language).
4. Gain the confidence to try anything.

Things you can do to encourage your children to read books:

1. Buy English books.
2. Create an environment for reading at home.
3. Provide times for quiet reading. Let them read quietly in their quiet times (no TV, no music and no computer or PSP games).
4. Have a lot of titles.
5. Provide books that related to the child's interests.

It is important for us to remember these:

1. Do not pressure the child to read.
2. Let your child tell you about the book.
3. Your child doesn't need to finish the book.
4. Always be positive if your child reads.
5. Be seen reading. When you read a book, let them see you then they will follow your reading habbit.

Nah, itu kayaknya yang bisa aku share dari hasil pertemuanku di Life Club for Parents di EF. Ini bagus banget, tips yang Insya Allah sangat bermanfaat, mudah-mudahan bisa aku praktekkan di rumah dengan anak-anakku. Semoga bermanfaat juga untuk yang membaca blog ini. Have fun reading!