Suggestions for Parents: Language Arts
Building Your Children’s Proficiency in Language Arts at Home
1. Immerse your child in a print-rich environment.  Include books, magazines, and newspapers.
2. Read a book, chapter, or a magazine/newspaper article together and discuss the story.
3. Read aloud to your children at bedtime.
4. Encourage your child to experience various genres in both fiction and nonfiction categories.
5. Share newspaper articles together on topics of interest and current events.  For those who purchase The Record, The Mini-Page is published in that newspaper every Tuesday.  Each Mini-Page edition centers on a nonfiction topic for children of Bogert School grade levels.  Besides the articles, there are a word search puzzle and a dot-to-dot graphic centered on that theme.  In addition, a joke section and a biographical blurb on a celebrity are featured.
6. Encourage your child to explore his/her interests when selecting reading material.He/she should select reading material on a comfortable level.  If your child cannot read five or more words on a page, then the reading level is probably too difficult.
7. Play board games, such as Monopoly and Scrabble, which focus on reading/word study.  Check stores for the many educational board games for children that are available.
8. Devote a time for reading your own books together as a family.  At the end of your sessions, share what you have read.
9. Visit libraries and book stores together for browsing and selecting books.
10. Take books along when going on vacation.
11. Purchase postcards to send to family and friends while on vacation.  Ask your child to write out some postcards.
12. Encourage your child to take photographs while on vacation, to write captions for them, to organize them in an album, and to share them.
13. Ask your child to design greeting cards and to write a message on them for special family members and friends.
14. Suggest that your son/daughter keep a journal to record information about vacation experiences.
15. Suggest that your son/daughter keep a journal while reading to record main idea, predictions, and responses to something read.
16. Read and write poetry together.  Your child can record lists in a notebook of specific words which create sensory images in both poetry and prose.
17. Have your child copy favorite poems to create a poetry booklet for reading and sharing.
18. Ask your son/daughter to illustrate a favorite scene from a book and to write a caption for it.
19. Encourage your child to write a letter to an author after reading a book.  The letter should be sent to the author, in care of (c/o) the publishing house.  The publishing house and its address can be found on the copyright page of every book.  Address the envelope.  Don’t be surprised if your child receives a reply from the author.
20. Last but not least, READ and WRITE daily!!