Reading Your Recycling:
Periodicals as Educational Aids
by Dr. Carl B. Smith
Instead of throwing out that growing stack of old newspapers and magazines,
use them to add a little variety to your child's reading program.
I think that with a little imagination, parents can find that even materials headed for the recycling bin can be excellent educational aids.
In my book Help Your
Child Read and Succeed, I offer the following tips on using
periodicals to improve children's reading and learning skills.
- Remind your child that reading periodicals is a vital activity
because the articles discuss everyday happenings like the weather, crime, and
movies.
- Use headlines and titles to help children think about contents of
articles and develop word-analysis skills. For example, consider the headline
"Europe Split on Election." What kinds of questions will enable a child to
understand this title and the article that follows?
- Cut up headlines for word-recognition activities and various kinds of
language games. Common sports words, for instance, can be clipped from
headlines in the sports section and the child can then underline each word as
it appears in articles. This game teaches kids how to recognize words and
shows how those words fit into larger units of meaning.
- Read the funnies. Not only are comics entertaining, but they also
enable a child to understand the idea of a story through the relation between
pictures and words.
- Use the table of contents to find information. Ask your child to find
out what is showing at the local movie theater, for example. Typically, she
will begin by randomly searching the paper for listings. Here is an
opportunity to teach her what a table of contents is, where to look for it,
and how to use it.
- Read the TV section of your local newspaper. Your child can become familiar with charts by
skimming the vertical and horizontal coordinates of TV listings to locate
information. Practicing this skill casually as the family plans what programs
to watch for the evening or the week will help your child learn to recognize
key organizational features of charts.
- Look at the pictures. This generates curiosity about related stories
and supplies the child with a host of pre-reading questions. A child can use
information provided in brief picture captions to associate an image with a
previously unfamiliar word.
- Study the ads, too. Discussing ad illustrations and related copy
teaches your child about reading. Also, it can be interesting to both parent
and child to identify the tactics used by advertisers to convince the reader
to buy something. Ads can be subtle, bold, humorous, informative, sentimental,
philosophical, and even deceptive. Recognizing ad strategies helps your child
become a reflective reader.
By using these techniques, valuable and interesting printed material that might have been simply thrown away can by 'recycled' by your young reader, and used to help his or her budding reading and analytical skills.
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