Help your kids improve their reading skills. With plenty of resources online, you won’t have to worry about taking on this challenge alone. Here are a few tips on which reading games, sites, and videos will be fun for you and your child. If you had a lot of fun being read to when you were young, then your kids will also love the activity. They’ll also benefit greatly from those story sessions. Help your kids master reading as well as nurture a love for it.
Staffal.com
This is an excellent online resource because it offers a slew of videos and activities for kids at different reading levels. You can choose from four categories: the ABCs, followed by Learn to Read, and It’s Fun to Read. The last is I’m Reading. With every level, the difficulty and complexity of the reading materials increase. With every category offering a ton of videos as well as games, you’ll have no shortage of what you and your kids can do at home to improve their reading skills and comprehension.
Hooked on Phonics
This is a good resource for teaching young kids. It has grade-specific kits online, but you can go to YouTube for many of the short videos it offers to see if it’s just what you’re looking for. Is it a good match for your children? It wouldn’t help to ask the teachers at your children’s Global Indian International School in Kuala Lumpur about the reading tools they use in class, too. It can provide an excellent sense of consistency if you introduce games or videos like the ones they use with their classmates and teachers. That familiarity can boost their confidence and help them improve their reading performance.
Kiz Phonics
This is a phonics-based system and has a ton of videos that your kids will enjoy. Your little ones will surely enjoy the interactive games as well. If you’re looking for online reading materials that will improve your children’s engagement levels or that they can do on their own while you see to chores or your deadlines, then these games will prove handy to you. You can choose from the following categories: short vowels, letter recognition, and capital as well as lower-case letters. When you play the animated videos, you’ll find out that they focus on one letter or syllable at a time, which is great for improving retention in your kids. If you want them to learn about the alphabet before they start reading, then this site provides plenty of material that you can use. One thing to note, though, this option offers content through subscription. However, they have plenty of free clips that you can test out and check to see if their videos are a hit with your kids. Try them out and observe whether your kids enjoy and learn from the lessons or not.
Teaching Channel
This is the channel that’s more geared towards teachers and parents. With a large library of videos that show you how lessons inside classrooms work, you find out how exceptional teachers can make learning so much more fun. It’s not just about recounting dry facts or telling your kids to memorize songs or rhymes. With the teaching channel, you learn of other methods that great instructors use, and you can use them as well. For instance, some use dramatization. Your kids can take this on by performing plays. Some use role-playing. You can assign roles to your kids and have them read through the parts of the character. They must act them out. Show them how by modulating your voice. Poster making is also an excellent activity. With plenty of exercises that you can adapt at home, your kids will be ready for school. If you’re doing this while your little ones are starting kindergarten, then you’re also making it easier for them to cope with their lessons. By knowing how to read early on, they’ll have an easier time digesting and retaining more complex lessons and information.
Brain Pop Jr.
You’ll find that many of the clips and games on site are free. However, like the Kiz Phonics, this is a subscription-based learning centre. The interactive videos are ideal for students of all ages, though, but the site is specially designed to address the needs of kindergarten students. Try them out and see if your kids like their videos.
Don’t forget that there are different types of learners. Test out other learning strategies. If your kids are auditory or visual learners or even kinesthetic learners, that you can research on better approaches to take to improve their level of memory retention. However, keep in mind that some people are combination-learners, meaning they fit more than one learning style. That’s all right. Just let your children keep trying out different styles until they find out which ones garner them the best results.
