The two most common pieces of advice about making children excel at reading are, “Have your child read more” and “Inspire a love of reading in your child.” It’s hard to decide which of those is more useless.
“Inspire a love of reading” assumes that you have to like something to be good at it. That’s nonsense. You can be in great shape but hate working out. You can be great at calculus without enjoying math homework. You can eat healthy food but prefer the taste of chips, soda, and lard.
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Sure, many students who are good at reading like it, but often they got good at it before they liked it. When a child excels at something, he or she tends to like it more. The excellence is the cause, not the effect.
“Have your child read more” assumes that untargeted practice automatically leads to excellence. Trying to become excellent at reading by just reading more is like trying to get become a great athlete just by taking the stairs instead of the elevator. No one has become an olympic athlete just by taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
Becoming a truly world-class reader requires building the core reading skills directly, just as becoming a world class athlete requires building muscles, endurance, flexibility, and heart and lung capacity directly. Practice is helpful, but not sufficient by itself.
The first core reading skill is vocabulary. If you don’t know what a word means, you can’t make much sense of a sentence containing that word.
Reading a lot can help you build your vocabulary, but many kids just skip over words they don’t know. To really build vocabulary, you need to take a direct approach. Vocabulary Workshop is great for beginner words, and Wordly Wise is great for even easier words. To get more advanced, you can use a program like Vocabulary Synapse (written by yours truly), or just use SAT vocabulary lists or flashcards. With a direct approach, your child will accomplish more in a few months than in several years of general reading.
The second skill is grammar. Most kids (and adults) do a lot of guesswork when they read. They take the individual meanings of the words in the sentence, and then guess the most likely meaning of the entire sentence based on those words. Obviously, that method doesn’t work for anything complex or abstract.
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The only way to correctly analyze complex material is to use the grammar of the sentence. World class readers do this subconsciously, but first they learn to do it consciously.
The best way to build an understanding of grammar is to study Latin. The second best way is to study English grammar directly. Do not count on a school to accomplish this. I have worked with students from dozens of top private and public schools, and have yet to see a school that adequately teaches grammar. The only exception are students who have taken several years of Latin.
Your child will have to learn grammar without much help from the school. Workbooks, such as English Workshop, are excellent tools. Make sure to include sentence diagramming as part of the training.
The final piece is concentration. If you lose focus easily, you can’t read well. Despite what many drug companies would have us believe, concentration skills can be improved without drugs. To do that, you first have to reduce or remove the very things that reduce concentration – TV, video games, etc. In fact, that, by itself, often is enough to sufficiently build concentration.
For that matter, removing TV and video games (including cell phone games!) is also the easiest way to get a child to read more. All people like entertainment, and if books are the only option, kids will read more.
People don’t become world class athletes by walking instead of driving, and they don’t become world class mathematicians by just doing a lot of easy math. To make a child excel at reading, use a direct approach that builds vocabulary, grammar, and concentration skills.