Reading+&+Writing+tips+for+at+home

In order to reinforce the skills being taught at school it is very important that parents/guardians are making reading and writing a priority at home too. Here are some tips on how you can increase your family's literacy. Some of these tips were taken from the National Council of Teachers of English. For more helpful tips visit their website at [|www.ncte.org].
 * TIPS FOR READING AND WRITING AT HOME**

- Establish a nightly reading ritual for the whole family. It is important for parents to encourage daily reading by modeling the behavior themselves. Each family member can either read by themselves or the whole family could read the same novel together. - Introduce your children to other authors/books in the genre that they like. - Bookmark online news sites and other Web pages that tap into your child’s interests. A good collection of Web sites, organized by subject can be found at http://www.ala.org/greatsites. - Subscribe to a magazine your children will enjoy. - Write notes to give your children "real life" reasons to read. - Make the library a regular stop. - Let your children see you reading for pleasure and talk to them about what you are reading. - Let your children see you write for pleasure. Send family letters to relatives or friends and have everyone in the family contribute a part or illustration. - When you go on a trip, keep a family journal of the activities and events you experience. - Have a family message center in a central location of the house where you can leave messages or write notes to one another. - Keep a family calendar in a central place so that everyone can write down their own special events. - If you watch the news on television, discuss the news with your children; compare the television or radio news to an article in the newspaper. - After you watch a movie talk about the characters, about how important the setting (time and place) was, and about the plot (sequence of events). Ask how the movie compares with a book and discuss an alternative ending you or the children might have written for the movie. - Discuss television viewing with your children and then have your children use the television guide to make a daily chart of programs they will watch. Read the short summaries of plots and descriptions of programs. - Use whatever the children have watched on television to connect to books. Help the children find books that give more information about something that has interested them on television. - Have your children read their own writing to other members of the family. - Make a family book that is a collection of stories: favorites retold generation after generation or stories of family events.