When comparisons begin to happen in primary school regarding reading levels, this can lead to a child feeling inadequate compared to other students in their class.
With any child, whether in primary or high school, I remind them that the true measure of success is whether you are improving, not if you are the best in the class or not.
A very effective technique I have been using for more than 15 years for improving a child’s reading ability and fluency, is also very simple. I recommend trying the following.
After reading one or two sentences, ask them to go back to the beginning and read again. Any word they didn’t know how to read is corrected and then they are immediately asked to go back to the beginning. This sends a message to the brain that the reading of the words is not a preference but a necessity to get right.
Also, the greatest threat to memory, especially with a child learning to read, is time. By going back to the beginning after each sentence or two, the brain recognises the words easier and reading fluency increases.
As they complete reading of the first page, continue the process on the second page. When going back to the first page, only focus on the words they weren’t confident with, to begin with, or didn’t know how to read, rather than reading the whole page again. Before finishing up their 10-15 minutes of reading (I wouldn’t focus on the number of pages read), ask them to do one straight reading of the pages they got through.
When you pick up where you left off the next time they read, I recommend they do a read through of the pages they covered the previous day before repeating the process the following day.
After doing the process, your child will be reading faster and understand why the process works. You can also make a game out of it by timing them on how fast they can read the page. (you can do a timing before the process and after so they get a sense of pride from their achievement).
At InFlow Education, this is how we rapidly improve the reading confidence and fluency in all our students. The ability to read faster, gives us back our greatest resource, time.
Try it and see for yourself what it does for your child.