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Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Strategies for Supporting your Child’s Success on TAKS

Reading/Language Arts

Set the expectation that your child will complete school and homework
assignments.
• Talk to your child’s teacher to find out more about the skills they are studying
at school.
• Talk to your child to build listening and vocabulary skills.
• Take time to read a wide variety of culturally diverse literature with your child
(newspapers, magazines, fiction, non-fiction, charts, and graphs). Stop now
and then to ask questions:
Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?
What do you think will happen next?
Why did the author/writer ….?
Can this really happen? Why or why not?
What does the author/writer mean by….?
• When you finish reading a selection with your child, discuss the setting,
characters, and events as appropriate.
• Listen to your child read. It helps increase fluency (which is the ability to make
few or no mistakes while reading at a natural pace).
• Compare stories and characters from one book to those in another book.
• Explore words and word meanings while reading. Look for words that have
the same meaning, words with two or more meanings, word opposites, words
that sound the same, and words with prefixes and suffixes.
• Encourage your child to write every day. Provide meaningful
opportunities (grocery lists, letters, messages, e-mails).
• Encourage your child to speak in complete sentences. Oral language and
writing are closely connected.
• Help your child develop curiosity—help his/her find answers to questions that
are not readily available (from the Internet, library, community members, etc.).
• Encourage your child to use a dictionary and a thesaurus.
• Help your child to recognize the relationship between his/her schoolwork and
everyday life. This will help your child make sense of the world and increase
his/her level of comprehension with new experiences or information.
Shopping - have your child read, evaluate, analyze, and problem-solve.
Cooking - have your child read, follow directions, measure, and estimate.
Chores - have your child organize and classify.
• Speak with your child’s teachers and ask them to show you how you can help
your child practice their reading skills at home.
• Be a role model for your child. Exhibit good reading practices. Model some
of the questions you ask yourself when you read on your own.
• Schedule regular family visits to libraries, bookstores, and other literary
activities.
• Set aside time for family reading - novels, newspapers, magazines.
• Act as your child’s audience. Have your child share his/her writing (stories
and other assignments) aloud to you.
• Start writing letters (not electronic mail) to family members and friends.