Literacy Lesson Plans and Ideas for Parents and Teachers

Ways to Help Children with Literacy Skills

Literacy Skills in the Classroom and at Home

As a reading teacher in a classroom, you probably use a lot of literacy lesson plans. You may have noticed several commonalities among lessons that teach different skills and are designed for different age groups. That's because most literacy lesson plans have certain features that often help students to become successful at reading.

As a parent, you may not directly follow lesson plans at home when teaching your own child. However, the same principles for teaching literacy in the classroom can be applied at home for positive results.

Literacy Lesson Plan Objectives

There are a number of questions that you can ask yourself about the objectives of a literacy lesson plan to make sure it meets the needs of your child or the students in your class.

1. Does the lesson satisfy your state's learning standards? If your child or class is going to be tested, this can be important.

2. Does the lesson have a clear objective and process?

3. Does the lesson have an introductory activity that activates background knowledge? This will help your child or class connect to the lesson and get involved.

4. Does the lesson incorporate a way for you to evaluate understanding?

Pre-Reading Techniques

To help ensure that children get the most out of a text, you may find pre-reading techniques quite useful. Look through a book with your child or the students in your class before reading it. If the book has pictures, use them to hold a discussion on what the book may be about. Look at the table of contents and chapter titles in order to get children involved with the story before beginning the actual reading.

Teaching Reading Comprehension and Fluency

The main components of literacy are reading comprehension and fluency. Reading comprehension gauges how well a child can analyze and understand various texts, from novels to poetry to nonfiction. When your child or class reads a text, have a series of questions prepared that require critical thinking. For example, have your child or students attempt to predict what may happen next in a narrative.

Another common way to help children increase their comprehension skills is by teaching them how to use context clues. Context clues are the words surrounding a new vocabulary word that explain what the unknown word means. Cover up a new word and have your child or class guess what it might mean, based on the words around it.

Reading fluency is how smoothly a child can read, without interruption or hesitation. Reading passages more than once is useful for fluency, as well as learning sight words. Sight words are simple words like 'as' and 'the' that a child can instantly recognize. To teach children sight words, flash cards can be immensely useful.