Summer language arts/reading activities

The language arts are extremely important. They are the means through which your children are able to receive information, think logically and creatively, and express their ideas. In the school curriculum, this includes reading, writing, spelling, vocabulary building, listening, speaking, handwriting, grammar and storytelling.

While your children are likely to do some reading in the summer, the following language arts/reading activities, can help them build their skills in severa; areas. Some of the activities are primarily designed to help students having problems in these areas. Others will reinforce skills through games. Many are designed to be done by several family members—thus promoting family fun.

A Newspaper Scavenger Hunt

Nothing will ensure that there will be another generation of newspaper readers like introducing your children to all newspapers offer. A scavenger hunt will acquaint your children with the organization of the newspaper and reinforce its very practical uses. Older children can race against the clock or their parents, and younger children and their parents can do some of the activities together. Have your children hunt through a newspaper to find the items listed below:

the index
a favorite comic strip
a movie to see
something good to eat
the cost of the paper
tomorrow's weather
the last or closing price of a stock
the score of a Major League Baseball game
the best TV program to watch at 5:00 p.m.
a letter to the editor
something that makes you frown
something that makes you smile
a picture of a public official
a local news story
a chart or graph
a story on health
an ad for a dog
something to drive
a quote
a crossword or word puzzle
an advice column
a headline from a story that is good news
a picture of someone you'd like to meet
a story about another state
something funny that is not on the comics page

When your older children have completed the activity, have them classify the items into sections, like: world news, local news, sports and entertainment. Extend the activity for younger children by having them circle all the smiling faces on the comics pages. Then read a few of the comics to them.

Try to make enjoying the paper together a summer ritual. The more your children learn about the newspaper, the easier it will be for them to use it for their schoolwork. After all, it is the only textbook that is always up-to-date.

Help for Struggling Readers

If your children are weak or struggling readers, try a technique called the Neurological Impress Method (NIM) with them. This technique as well as others is described in the Skill Builders section of resources under Improving Your Children's Reading Skills with Techniques that Work at Home.

To use NIM only takes from 10 to 15 minutes a day, with 10 being sufficient for young or restless children. By impressing what is being read on children's brains, NIM can help most poor readers read more fluently. And research supports that it works with first-graders as well as high school students.

To obtain the best results with NIM, it is extremely important to follow these steps exactly:

Begin with material that is very easy for your child to read. Then, as you meet with success, move rapidly toward material on his or her grade level.
Sit your child slightly in front of you so you will be reading into his or her right ear.
Hold the reading material with your child.
Read the material out loud with your child at a normal rate.
Have your child run his or her finger under each word as it is spoken. At first, you might have to guide your child.
Read as many pages as you can in a session.
Never ask your children questions about what has been read.
When you start to use NIM, you might need to read slower or repeat sentences for your child. For some children, it might even be necessary to repeat phrases within a sentence many times before they can read an entire sentence.

Later on, you can lower your voice to let your child lead the reading. After four accumulated hours of instruction, you should have a good idea of whether NIM is working effectively with your child. Unfortunately, it doesn't help all children. If it is the right method for your child, however, he or she could be reading at his or her grade level after eight to 12 hours.

Once your child is reading at the level where he or she is expected to be, very little improvement will take place, even with additional NIM sessions.

To keep your child's interest in using NIM, use varied materials. Try newspapers, magazines, and both fiction and nonfiction.

Memory Skill Fun

Whether your children are in preschool or high school, part of their schooling is likely to include the memorization of rhymes, poems, songs, and lots of facts. Help them get a head start with the following activities:

Preschool and Kindergarten

Have your children memorize short, popular nursery rhymes like "Jack and Jill" and "Hickory, Dickory, Dock." It will give them some of the awareness of sound that they need to become readers. If you also have them act out the rhymes, it will make the language more meaningful, as children this age learn through their bodies.

Grades One, Two and Three

Children in these grades should be memorizing longer nursery rhymes and poems such as, "The House That Jack Built." Learning longer pieces will help them acquire memorization skills.

Grades Four and Beyond

Sometime in school, almost every child has to learn the names of the 50 states. One of the most enjoyable ways for them to do this is by learning to sing the catchy song "Fifty Nifty United States" which was written by Ray Charles. We know college students who still recall the names of all the states by singing this tune. It is not always easy to find. Try music stores first. If they do not have the sheet music, the stores can order it from Shawnee Press. Or you can visit the company's Web site at www.shawneepress.com to find dealers who carry this song.

Ways to Improve Handwriting

Summer is a great time to focus on improving your children's handwriting skills. Legibility really counts on all the work your children do.

Preschool

Show your young children how writing is used to communicate with others. Let them see you write notes, and then read the notes to them. Give the children a good supply of paper and a wide variety of writing tools—from crayons to marking pens—so they can "write" notes to you.

Kindergarten

Help your children have fun as they review the letters that they know. They can use paint brushes and water to write these letters on the sidewalk and trace them in sand, dry jello or salt. If they are interested, teach them how to write their first names. It is helpful if children can do this before they enter school.

Elementary and Middle School

Twenty-five percent of all math errors can be traced back to sloppy handwriting. Have your children make up complex addition and multiplication problems for others to solve. They will need to write them neatly. To check the answers, they can use a calculator.

Becoming a Better Listener

Listening is one of the most important language-arts skills. We have suggested activities for different levels at school, but almost all of the activities can be adapted for every age level. Besides being fun, all of the activities will improve your children's listening skills.

Preschool and Kindergarten

Go outside two or three different times in the day. Everyone should shut his or her eyes and listen for several minutes. Then in turn, everyone should tell one thing that he or she heard until all the sounds have been named.
Use books in which your children press a button to hear sounds from the story.

Elementary School

Find a docent-led tour of a museum that would be fun for your children to visit. For example, you might go to a toy, children's, or car museum.
You and your children can visit a shop, art gallery or museum where you follow instructions to complete a craft project.

Middle School and Beyond

Join your children at a cooking school, like those you see in grocery stores. Everyone will have to listen carefully so the food items will taste like they should.
Listen together to the news or a talk program on the radio. Or listen to a television program without looking at the picture. Then talk about what you heard.

Lots of Talking

How well your children can speak in school influences their participation in classroom discussions and their ability to give oral reports. Confident speakers tend to get higher grades because their verbal skills impress their teachers. The more your children talk at home, the better they will speak at school.

Preschool and Kindergarten

Have your young children practice telling you their names, addresses, telephone numbers and how to contact you. Then let them have fun with this information by recording and listening to it.
Instead of reading a familiar story to your children, take turns telling the story.
Stop while reading a story and ask your children what they think will happen next.

Elementary School

As a speech icebreaker at the dinner table, play games. You might have everyone ask questions to guess the name of an object in the room or of a family friend, relative or famous person.
Using paint and scraps of material available in your home, have your children dress up their fingers as different characters in their favorite stories. Then have them use their finger puppets to act out the story for friends or other family members.

Middle School and Beyond

Encourage your children to talk with adults in your family about their recollections of landmark events in their lives. They will also be learning a bit of history as they talk about such things as the first landing on the moon, Pearl Harbor, Sept. 11, and Vietnam.
At the dinner table, have everyone, including parents, narrate their daily experiences in sequential order. This could become a favorite family nighttime routine.

Fun Ways to Improve Spelling

Many people now say that spelling is not important because you can always use the computer to spell check. However, most classroom work as well as the SAT essay is still done with paper and pencil.

Preschool and Kindergarten

Give your children sidewalk chalk. Then encourage them to write words, letters or messages on the sidewalk for informal spelling practice.
Have your children write words or messages using glue to form the letters and then sprinkle the glue with glitter or sand.

Elementary School

Play Boggle frequently with your children to build spelling skills.
Dump the contents of a box of alphabet cereal, candy or crackers or the letters from Scrabble on a table; then have your children dive into the pile and make as many words as they can in 3 or 5 minutes.

Middle School and Beyond

Introduce your children to the word searches and crossword puzzles in newspapers, children's magazines and books.
Three other games that encourage spelling practice are Hangman, Scrabble, and Bananagrams, an easy type of Scrabble game that is a lot of fun.

Becoming an Active Reader

Really good readers interact with what they are reading and tie it back to their own knowledge and experiences.

Preschool and Kindergarten

As you read to your young children, stop and ask them questions that make them think: Was it wise for Jack to sell the cow for some beans? Should Jack have taken the ogre's gold? ("Jack and the Beanstalk")

Elementary School

Have a time when everyone in your house sits in the same room and reads his or her book. Set a timer for five minutes. When the buzzer goes off, ask:

What will the hero do next?
Everyone then resumes reading. Then the next time the buzzer goes off, ask:
Did he or she act as you predicted?
If not, would your prediction have made a better story? Why?

Middle School and Beyond

Take turns reading a book with your child. At the end of every reading session, discuss together whether the hero acted wisely.

Fun Ways to Improve Handwriting

Handwriting skills remain important, as most schoolwork is still done with pencil and paper rather than on computers. Plus, poor handwriting is bound to influence teachers' reactions to your children's papers.

Preschool and Kindergarten

The better the small motor skills (manual dexterity) your children have, the more prepared they will be to learn how to write well. Here are some activities to prepare them for handwriting:

String beads.
Do finger pushups by opening and closing clothespins with the thumb and index fingers. See how many repetitions everyone can do.
Move objects with tweezers.
Put pennies into a piggy bank.

Elementary

Keep improving your children's small motor skills by having them eat with chopsticks and play the game Operation.
Select an alphabet letter, then give each child a favorite book. Have the child write as many words as possible beginning with that letter found in the book in 5 minutes.

Middle School and Beyond

Gather all the photos in your home and place them in albums. Have your children use their best handwriting to label the pictures.
Introduce your children to calligraphy. Encourage them to make signs to display in your home.

Ways to Build Vocabulary

The larger your children's vocabulary, the better they will read and even score on the SAT. Here are some entertaining ways to build their vocabulary.

Preschool and Kindergarten

Every family outing can be used to build your children's vocabulary. At the grocery store, you can acquaint them with food items that are not in their everyday vocabulary such as lima beans, pecans and prunes. A visit to a hardware store can be a definite vocabulary builder as your children learn about pliers, drills and wrenches. Even a fun trip to a railroad museum is a vocabulary builder as your children pick up new words such as caboose, locomotive and diesel.

Elementary School

While your children look at the story with you, read Amelia Bedelia books to them. It's a great way for them to learn about the interesting way words can be used, especially homophones, literalisms and idiomatic expressions.

Middle School and Beyond

The British and Americans use different words for the same object. Can your children find the American equivalent for these words: draughts, lorry, dummy, biscuit, chips, bonnet, nappy, queue, jumper, lift, hoover, anorak, bobby, cot, boot, wardrobe and sweets? They can search online for a Web site that provides this information or use a dictionary.
Have your children type a paragraph from a story or the newspaper on the computer. Then they should use the word processor thesaurus function to change as many words as they can while keeping the original meaning.

Storytelling

This is a skill that helps children develop their oral language skills and teaches them how to present material in a sequential order. Being a good storyteller definitely pays dividends at school. It can be especially enjoyable to practice this skill around campfires in the evening.

Preschool and Kindergarten

Take your children to a storytelling session at the local library so they will learn to truly appreciate how great a good storyteller is.
Have your children frequently retell favorite stories. Encourage them to change the ending if they would like to do so.

Elementary School

In the car or at a picnic, have your children take turns telling a story alternating between using "Luckily ..." and "Unluckily ..." to start each sentence. Or every sentence can start with one or other of these words.

Middle School and Beyond

Encourage your older children to play games that actually involve some storytelling, such as Fabrication, and they'll discover storytelling is fun.

Improving Reading Fluency

Reading fluently with expression is definitely a big part of the language-arts process. Not only does it improve comprehension, it also makes children confident oral readers in the classroom. Plus, fluency is one skill that is relatively simple to improve in students who don't have serious reading or communication disorders. The following activities can be adapted to work with children of all skill levels.

Modeling fluency: A good reader reads a short passage several times as a model before having the child read the passage. Make it fun by reading humorous poems by Bruce Lansky and Shel Silverstein. Poems like these will really enhance your children's use of expression in their reading.
Repeated reading: After a good reader has modeled how a short passage is to be read, the child reads the passage aloud several times until he or she can read it fluently. If necessary, the good reader can model the reading of the passage more than once.
Paired reading: The good reader reads the short passage. Then the child reads it with him or her until the child can read the passage without any assistance.
To really improve fluency, three passages should be worked on each day for several weeks. Adjust the length and difficulty of the passage to the child's ability. To show the child how he or she is improving, record passages at the beginning and end of a week.

Reviewing Basic Grammar through Games

It should be helpful for your children to review this important aspect of language arts before school starts. Bring grammar alive through these games.

Preschool and Kindergarten

Tell your children that the names of people, places and things are called nouns. Then have them name all the things that they can see in a room or during a car drive. Remind them that these words are nouns. Do the same thing to name people and places.
While in the car or at the dinner table, you can play the "I pack my suitcase, and I put in a ..." game. Each player names an object (noun) for a successive letter of the alphabet.

Elementary School

Take any object (apple, pencil, toy) and have your children take turns using a word to describe it until they can't think of any more words. Be sure to mention that all the descriptive words are called adjectives.
Divide everyone into two teams to play Verb Charades. They can use such easy verbs as "kick," "run," "jump," and more difficult ones like "think," "move" and "raise."

Middle School and Beyond

Gather several pictures. See how many objects (nouns) in a picture each player can write down in one minute. Declare the one who named the most different objects the winner.
Play 20 Questions to review question words and how to form questions.