What makes a great reader

This goal of becoming a "good reader" is multifaceted. We can reach one part of the goal early on and take months or even years to reach the rest. Slow progress is okay, even celebrated. This is the third post in the Charlotte Mason Reading series. Hop on back to the first post here, if you'd like! Fluency is probably the first thing most of us think of when we hear the term "good reader. Decoding is what we start to teach as soon as our children learn their ABC's.

They are learning the symbols so that they can crack the code. A child who struggles to make sense of letters will not be able to decode words, and the struggle to decode words means that they'll have trouble comprehending them, too. Once decoding is secured, a child starts to read more smoothly and with less effort. This will allow the cognitive parts of reading to fall into place more easily. In a Charlotte Mason home, we skip the comprehension questions and worksheets and instead use narration as a comprehension tool.

We can assess what a child remembers by asking them to narrate after each reading. If a child can't tell back, there are several different possibilities as to why. Maybe they aren't paying attention, they didn't understand the book, or they are disinterested. Eventually, through repeating the act of narration, our children will learn to pay attention and be able to remember what they read.

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Resources on child development and motivation for your classroom. The complete collection of articles, lesson ideas, print-ready resources, and more. About Us. Children start with the easiest elements in kindergarten, and by the end of the year they can read simple words like cat.

In first grade, phonics is a major focus. Children learn to read words with long vowel sounds like rope , and words with vowel combinations like trail.

In second grade, phonics instruction wraps up with some more advanced skills, along with strategies for reading longer words.

Learning phonics has a powerful impact—it gives children the tools they need to read the majority of words they encounter. Learning sight words goes hand-in-hand with phonics.

Sight words are the most common words your child will encounter while reading—words like was , that , and said. These words make up a significant percentage of the words in books for beginning readers, so being able to recognize them automatically by sight makes learning to read much easier. Children learn to read sight words as whole words, rather than sounding them out using phonics. Once children begin to master decoding skills and build a strong sight vocabulary, their reading really starts to pick up steam.

They can handle most of the decodable words they run into, and they can recognize the rest by sight. Now a big reading milestone is around the corner: fluency. Fluent reading sounds smooth and natural, the way people sound when they talk. Fluent readers read words instantly and accurately, at a good pace, and their reading is expressive. In order to achieve fluency, children need to master basic decoding skills.

For most kids, this happens by the end of second grade or the beginning of third grade. Once they no longer need to sound out each word, reading gets smoother and quicker. The biggest way that children build fluency is by doing lots of reading.

Achieving fluency has a tremendous impact on young readers. For one, fluency is the bridge to good comprehension. Fluency is the gateway to a love of reading. Comprehension is the ability to understand what you read. The best way to think about this is to look at what children with good comprehension do when they read. Good readers actively engage with the story and identify with the characters. They visualize what is happening, follow the events of the story and anticipate what will happen next.

A good reader is able to explore the meaning of a story and connect it to his or her own life. How do children build comprehension? They need a foundation of solid decoding skills and fluency, and a strong vocabulary.

Above all, though, children need to do a lot of reading to build comprehension. Strong comprehension gives kids a big academic boost in all subjects.

There are big personal rewards, too—children who read with good comprehension really enjoy it, and the more they enjoy it the more they want to read. This is how kids become readers!

In order to have strong comprehension, kids need to understand the meaning of the words they read. Children learn vocabulary in a variety of ways.