Teaching your Child to Read

Dear M.V. Beattie Families,

One of our school goals is to help our students improve their reading – both for information and enjoyment.  We know how important reading is to current and future academic success.  Beyond academics, reading to learn is an essential part of our lives as we pursue different careers.  However, before we can get to “reading to learn,” we must first learn to read.

At Beattie, we have excellent reading instruction in our primary years, and we have found it helpful to our students (and our staff) to use the same language for the strategies we implement.  Our students in Kindergarten are first exposed to these strategies:  “Eagle Eye,” “Lips the Fish,” “Stretchy Snake,” “Chunky Monkey,” “Flippy Dolphin,” “Skippy (Skip It) Frog,” and “Tryin’ Lion.” When we use the same language for the strategies it becomes easy for teachers to explain to one another what they have been working on with each child – which is really important when we transition students from one grade to the next.  

We also know that our parent community plays an essential role in helping MVB students become successful readers.  However, in the past we have simply hoped that you would read to them and with them for 15-20 mins. per night – and not really provided any guidance as to how you can help. I know when my children were learning to ready, my level of understanding of how to teach my sons to read seemed to always result in the same expression, “sound it out”.

To help our families, we have one of our teachers, Mrs. Pratt, demonstrating some of the strategies that we use to help our students learn to read.  We are hoping that you will find this useful in your home reading practice – and that by continuing to use the same language for reading strategies in both school and home environments our kids will flourish in reading. 

*A note about these videos.  They are numbered for your convenience, but as students become better readers, we will often combine the strategies.  There isn’t necessarily an order, as students will begin to use them all at different times as they choose which strategy is needed to learn the words on the page.

**A big thank you to Mrs. Pratt for her work on these videos, and for our primary teachers for their ongoing role in introducing reading to our children. 

Regards,

Gene Doray

Principal