Developing Reading Skills in Young Learners: Interactive Methods and Games

Even though teaching young learners has so many bad sayings, it has its own benefits. Sure, something is true. 

The majority of teachers struggle with impatience, hyperactivity or vice versa, negligence from the young learners’ side. Why negligence? Sometimes children do not understand what for and why. Their parents want them to learn, but not the children themselves. That’s a stumbleblock.

Benefits Of Young Learners

On the other hand, talking about learners who came to learn, sorry for a tautology, but it’s true. Here are some perks.

Brain Work

No Outsmarting, No Translation

As it turned out, the children unconsciously remember more and implement it into their speech even without noticing. Being so gifted and not appreciating it.

They learn it in games, during communication with peers. And, they do not push themselves. It is a natural process.

Teachers Are Navigators

Sure, the teacher contributes to such processes, too. One of them is reading skills. Putting some effort from the teacher’s side will help to develop it. There is a variety of interesting ways to do it. And again, easy, naturally, relaxing. 

Key Reading Skills To Develop

But what actually is a reading skill? There are plenty. Before teaching and choosing a correct activity, the teacher should be aware of all kinds of them.

1. Phonemic awareness

Phonemic awareness — recognising and manipulating sounds. First and foremost, reading starts with learning letters and sounds. The students need to know how to pronounce everything correctly.

That’s the first step before they can even match letters to sounds. What is more, it helps decode new words easily.

How To Develop

Here are a couple of activities to brush up on phonemic awareness.

The children need to take words that sound similar among the cards, identify them and pronounce. 

For example: 

• cat — fat — mat,
• key — sea — tea.

The teacher’s task is to pronounce random words, and the students have to clap as many times as many syllables they hear. 

For example: strawberry — 3 syllables, so 3 claps. Easy!

Here, the teacher has to say 3 words again, where one is different from the others by its sound, ending or beginning. The children need to spot it and say it out loud. 

For example: sun — sit — cat. 

The odd one is “cat”. 

The teacher says the individual sounds slowly. Something like: d – a – r – k. 

The students’ task is to pronounce the whole match, blend all these letters into one word.

2. Decoding

Decoding is applying knowledge of phonemic awareness (phonics) to pronounce written words. Simply, it’s connecting letters with sounds to form words. It’s like the translation of written syllables. It’s what allows the children to sound out the words that they have never seen. They learn from scratch; therefore, they know how to read what they have never seen.

How To Develop

So, how to brush up on decoding? Here are some games and methods.

Previously, there was such a practice in the previous stage. Here’s an extended version.

The teacher says the individual sounds slowly, something like: d – a – r – k. The students’ task is to pronounce the whole word and blend all these letters into one word.

The next step is to do vice versa: the teacher says the word “dark”, and the students break it into sounds: d – a – r – k.

These activities can be done with toys, flashcards, or clapping for each sound.

Students listen to a word (like ship) and mark the correct sound pattern on their bingo card (sh). It will help them to get familiar with the sounds even more.

The teacher can assign the students to read some words and mark the correct sound that they hear. 

But the words will be unusual, or even non-existent: “lat, mig, tup, or shope”. It will definitely boost their skills.

Once learners master decoding single words, the teacher can extend their tasks to mini-dialogues.

For example:

• “The cat sat on the mat.”
• “The ship is big.”

Students read out loud, then flag up the similar sounds in the words and discuss what they mean.

3. Vocabulary

Vocabulary building is the same as reading, but with understanding words in context. 

The students might already work with words of families. Linguistically, it means that the words have similar patterns: make, bake, fake or peel, feel.

They come across synonyms and antonyms in the texts.

How To Develop

So, this is basically a wall. As the children learn new words, they can add them to the wall in alphabetical order. 

They can be added by themes: family, fruits, activities, etc. As they work on the creation of the wall as well, they tend to remember its spelling and meanings better.

Before reading, they make their own story. The teacher can choose a few words from the previous lesson and ask the students to make a story with them. 

One student — one sentence — one word.

Alternatively, this task can be done individually, which will not be so funny for them, but effective. The teacher can ask the students to write mini-dialogues or make sentences where they would use all the key vocabulary.

While reading, the students need to highlight unknown words and then try to guess or explain their meanings. It will help them to build an understanding of words and comprehension of the text.

4. Reading comprehension

Reading comprehension is grasping the main idea, details, and inferences. 

While being on a reading stage, the students can identify what they read: the main idea, supporting details. They learn how to think critically and analyse what is read.

How To Develop

That is a task where the students need to put all events from the story into the correct order. 

At first, they read, then arrange printed strips of paper to make up a story.

This game is perfect for developing memory as the students need to read, then create a map with all the essentials: places, characters. The teacher can help a little bit. The list of leading questions will be enough. 

It can look like:

The answers must be written one by one; extra details are welcome.

Each time the teacher reads a story with their students, they can pause at any time to pose some questions. 

Something like:

It will help to build up creativity, understanding of text and analysing what they read.

5. Fluency

Last but not least. Fluency is reading with accuracy, speed, and expression. That’s a step toward making it perfect, as the priority was on understanding. 

Fluency means being able to read smoothly without awkward pauses or speech stumbles. At the same time, maintain natural rhythm and expression. 

It is high time the students learnt to read elaborately and understand simultaneously.

How To Develop

The teacher reads a small passage of text, showing the intonation, rhythm and tempo, making good pauses and no mistakes. The students repeat later. 

It is good to gradually enlarge chunks of text. The start can be just from one sentence.

A timer is wanted! It is a method where the students need to read as much as they can in a minute. At the same time, stick to a good intonation and make the needed pauses. 

It is rather funny and challenging, so do not make it a priority during the lessons. It should not be a competition, just practice.

One big story that is split between students. Each of them reads a sentence, passing to the next one. 

In this method, besides reading, they have to be vigilant and stay focused on the text.

General Tips

Such games and methods will help to build overall awareness of sounds and then reading comprehension. 

All of these steps seem so tiny, but they do matter. It builds independent reading skills and teaches the children to infer meaning, a key skill for comprehension. 

That’s how the slow but confident learning process starts. And it is a great example of how it works, and does in favour of young learners.