The Reading and Writing Connection

Reading time tips that benefit writing development:

Writing tips that reinforce reading strategies:

• Casually run your finger under a word your child knows, or has recently used in writing to reinforce word recognition
• Emphasize the importance of punctuation as you read (i.e. make a quick point of stopping when you see a period, pause at a comma)
• Encourage your young reader to think about how he writes a word he does not know (one chunk at a time) and model breaking longer words into chunks by running your finger along the word, one section at a time (i.e. re – mem – ber)
• If your child stops reading mid-sentence, ask him to reread the whole sentence from the beginning to ensure he understands and remembers what he has read
• Ask your budding reader to imagine what it would be like to read the story without spaces between the words!

• Encourage your author – in – the – making to write with the reader in mind. What makes it easy to read? (spaces, punctuation, capital letters on names of people and things)
• If your child pauses for more than a few seconds between words as she writes, ask her to reread her sentence from the beginning to ensure that what she is writing makes sense, sounds right and looks right. This will also tell her what word to write next or if her sentence is complete.
• When faced with an unknown word, consider what she might already know. Help her write the small parts of the word and check by running your finger along the print as you did while reading together. Are all of the parts there? (For example, she may know the word 'yes' or 'day': yes – ter – day)