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How to Improve Reading Skills for Better Academic Performance

Knowing how to improve reading skills of your kid early can help you prevent gaps in the future. That’s for sure. Even if they do okay in a reading class, basic reading skills are a foundation, while advanced reading skills are keys to performance in middle school.

Read on to know what matters in mastering reading skills and learn tips on how to approach kids’ reading skills improvement in the best way.

What are the 5 basic reading skills?

The 5 basic reading skills are phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. They are so-called the “Big 5,” the abilities and knowledge allowing the children to recognize and manipulate sounds, match them to letters, get meanings, and, thus, read and understand texts.

The basic reading skills ensure the development of proficient readers and lay the ground for the science of reading.

The primary ways to improve these skills refer to explicit phonemic and phonics exercises, decoding, and vocabulary activities.

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Top 10 ways to improve reading skills

• Work with a professional reading tutor
• Practice decoding skills daily
• Play phonemic awareness games
• Apply repeated reading to develop fluency
• Find ways to enlarge their vocabulary
• Use structure to support cognitive skills
• Try involving other senses in reading
• Connect activities to kids’ interests and favorite activities
• Apply technology to support reading
• Combine reading and writing exercises

#1 Work with a professional reading tutor

Best for: kids of any grade and reading level

Professional tutoring is an effective way to provide consistent reading support and cope with current knowledge gaps. The main benefit is that tutors have the capacity and knowledge to answer specific learning needs, like a pace or certain learning style types, and find interventions to challenge a lack of motivation.

Besides, the tutoring practice offers a great variety of options, from personalized platforms to an offline tutoring center.

How to improve students reading skills with reading tutors?

Brighterly is one of the excellent examples of how tutors help students from 1st to 9th grade fix their current reading problems, get better grades, and recognize why reading is important.

Brighterly reading program aims to improve reading skills via personalized and interactive methods, adjusting them to your kid’s knowledge gaps and interests.

How does it work?

• First, its tutors handle a reading skills test to immediately see knowledge gaps that need to be worked on.
• After that, they set a customized plan for 1:1 personalized sessions that will make them more confident and fluent at reading.

This online learning platform concentrates on fundamental literacy abilities but also can teach critical thinking, story analysis, and vocabulary growth. The composition of the course will depend on your child’s needs and preferences.

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#2 Daily decoding practice

Best for: kids who have just started training their reading skills

How to improve reading skills at a young age? By targeting a foundational skill.

Daily decoding is a primary way for kids to improve linking letters to sounds. Why? It allows setting up a solid system as a ground for further development. You can look at it as a developing house foundation.

How decoding practice helps children read new words

Practicing each phonics aspect, including the alphabetic principle, segmentation, and blending, is like laying bricks. Once kids easily connect sounds with words and words with meaning, they obtain the skill of reading effortlessly.

If we talk about new words, each brick allows recognizing word formation patterns. There, the practice covers the gaps between the letters and sounds and sets a decoding system.

Here are the ways to make decoding a habit:

• Regularly pick up a text and break random phrases from it into words, and then words into individual letters and sounds.
• Vary topics and steadily increase the complexity of the words and sentences you choose.

#3 Use phonemic awareness games

Best for: kids who always want to have fun

Combining games with phonemic awareness basics does a great job at keeping kids motivated and engaged. Try playing with rhymes, combining sounds, and replacing letters to create new words. The key here is to teach your kid phonemic awareness, but choose a game format to decrease the cognitive load of the child.

How to improve reading skills in students with games

• Use multisensory tools to create letters: you can use plasticine, hand-outs, letters, clay, dough, mosaics, or seeds.
• Experiment together using rhyming sounds and invent random combinations with them.
• Play games like the Words of the Week, Silly Soup, or I Spy Sounds, to recall words.

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#4 Repeated reading

Best for: kids who need more time to understand all the details before learning

Sometimes, kids need to reread the passage or reuse some letters one more time after a break to overcome their reading problems. If your child learns in this manner, make rereading your priority — but make sure it doesn’t overwhelm them. If you push it too hard, they can start associating reading with boredom.

How repeated reading contributes to improved reading skills

Rereading is equal to controlled processing, or the practice where a new skill gets extra effort and time to be performed with greater precision in the future. On the other hand, it contributes to increasing the accuracy, fluency, and speed of reading.

#5 Focusing on vocabulary

Best for: curious kids who get inspired by learning something new

Unfamiliar words may be a stress factor for your kid. That’s why enlarging vocabulary is a key activity for most struggling readers.

To make it effective, consider playing the Word of the Day game: find an interesting word, learn its meaning, discuss its application in your lives, and use it as your password in conversation for something special.

How do vocabulary skills make reading easy?

• Knowing many words facilitates the ability to quickly catch the meaning of the texts.
• Rich vocabulary is the basis for fluent speech and critical thinking.
• According to the PMC research, vocabulary is the background for reading skills development.

How to balance challenge and boredom when teaching vocabulary?

When teaching vocabulary or playing games, make sure you don’t overload kids. You can resort to the READ approach explained by Sigmundson and their evaluation of challenges and skills.

#6 Structured reading support to back cognitive skills

Best for: kids who need order and structure

When your kid lacks focus and order, impacting memory and attention, it may negatively affect reading skills. In that case, you can apply structured reading. Use it when a kid has issues with deciphering words, starting a new topic, or when their focus regularly drifts.

Under it, make sure a child has proper resources, frameworks, space, and time to read, work with the text, and see its nuances.

How to improve reading skills with more structure?

• Set a specific time to ask questions and find answers together, and make discussions predictable to decrease the cognitive load.
• Break lessons into parts where you work on the text and its structure, and where kids focus on engaging parts that interest them.
• Leave room for feedback to encourage them to discuss feelings, mistakes, and conclusions.
• Set up a consistent reading spot — quiet, well-lit, and free of screens or other distractions — so your kid learns to associate it with focus.

#7 Multisensory ways to improve your reading skills

Best for: kids who can benefit from visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile learning

Applying several senses in learning increases the depth of perception, and you can use this specifically as an everyday tactic to improve reading skills.

Introduce movement, gestures, touching, music, and drawing into reading practice in your teaching methods to help your kid absorb new information more easily.

Examples of multisensory activities

• Writing letters on paper or sand
• Clapping and signing while pronouncing sounds
• Supplementary sounds and visual effects on the text in YouTube
• Drawing images of what was just read

#8 Using kids’ interests and favourite activities

Best for: passive learners who are passionate about something

It’s hard to hook a child into reading if their mind is constantly somewhere else. If you know what their current interests are, try to connect reading pieces and activities to them.

There are so many ways you can do it, from writing the letters on their soccer ball to practicing dancing while telling the story of the text they just read.

How to get better at reading via connecting to kids’ interests?

• Decoding skills: Read and discuss together favourite stories, phrases, quotes of characters, and proverbs.
• Vocabulary: Use sticky notes to start vocabulary challenges on behalf of their favorite characters, and provide a reward.
• Comprehension: Mix favorite stories with unfamiliar subjects, background, topics, or settings, or support reading by playing out or dancing.

#9 Using technologies for reading

Best for: kids who prefer their phones to everything in the world

To improve reading skills with technology, you should do a little of your own research. Yet, the best ones target specific basic skills, receive praise from tutors, and allow your kid to set success goals and get a reward or some points for the right answers.

Meeting these criteria will help make the practice interactive yet productive.

A few things worth checking before picking a reading app or tool:

• Text-to-speech or read-aloud features that model fluent pronunciation
• Built-in progress tracking, so you can see which skills need more practice
• Adjustable difficulty that adapts to your kid’s current reading level

Does listening to audiobooks improve your reading skills?

Yes, it does. When you combine written text with its audiobook version, you involve a multisensory approach in learning and influence the depth of perception. Also, audiobooks cover the gap between word recognition and pronunciation, which can boost your kid’s ability to understand complex syntax and enlarge their vocabulary.

#10 Combine reading and writing activities

Best for: kids struggling with basic reading skills

Lastly, mix reading and writing activities, from writing down vocabulary to storytelling. It helps to target several basic reading skills all at once.

In particular, the 2023 EdWeek post provides that if kids practice writing when working with decodable texts with controlled vocabularies, they better understand texts and how narratives work.

To make writing exercises work, whether in elementary and middle school, link writing tasks to both reading and personal experience. It can support their confidence and help them enjoy reading.

What are great ways to use writing for reading skills

• Inspire kids to write reading journals
• Ask them to write an essay upon carefully picked materials so they connect emotions and book events.
• If kids fail to remember patterns or passages, combine reading with writing, drawing, and using graphic materials, or organizers.

Reading skills by grade level: Methods to use

	Reading skills to target	Effective exercises
Kindergarten	Phonemic awareness, letter-sound correspondence, and early vocabulary.	Phonics games, rhyming, and reading aloud together.
1st grade	Decoding via phonics (simple words), recognition of common sight words, and blending sounds into words.	Daily read-alouds, sight word lists, asking questions about stories, and guided reading.
2nd grade	Fluent decoding, larger vocabulary, reading short texts independently, responding to questions, and connecting to personal experience.	​​Repeated practice, drawing and retelling stories, and vocabulary building via experiences.
3rd grade	Reading with expression, the ability to identify main ideas, paragraph structure, and to draw conclusions.	Reading and discussion in groups, comprehension games, and vocabulary exercises.
4-5th grades	Using context to comprehend vocabulary, identification of themes, opinions, elements of a story, and comparing perspectives.	Reading journals, vocabulary notebooks, clues games, and discussions.
6-8th grades	Evaluation of texts, their purpose, understanding arguments and evidence, and narrative techniques.	Discussion-based learning, vocabulary notebooks, and note-taking.
8-12th grades	Comprehending symbolism and rhetorical devices, analyzing arguments, and advanced critical reading.	Analytical and comparative writing, independent research, and discussions.

 

For a closer look at what happens at each step of this progression, see the stages of reading development.

What causes poor reading skills in children?

Poor reading skills in children may arise from different factors that relate to cognitive development, environment, and instructional approach. Nevertheless, the most common causes refer to:

• Specific learning needs. Kids may experience recognition and decoding issues because of ADHD or a certain level of dyslexia.
• Cognitive processing. As some kids have deficits in working memory or processing speed, it may be hard for them to retain information or focus on text.
• Lack of vocabulary/phonological awareness. Instructors may overlook certain gaps at a young age, yet they will affect reading development in the long term.
• Lack of practice and access to books. Limited exposure to reading can hinder development, especially in middle school.
• Emotional factors. Such factors as cognitive overload, anxiety, and lack of confidence can affect motivation and kids’ efforts.

Helping kids build strong reading skills

We can say for sure that improving reading skills is a matter of time, effort, and the right approach. Remember that the strength of reading depends on such skills as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Reading is a big part of the picture, but not the whole of it — see how it fits into a child’s broader literacy development, which also covers writing and language skills.

Thus, you should be consistent and use different activities that target all basic reading skills, especially ones you kid struggle with.

What are some ways to improve reading skills? Here’s our top:

• Practice daily decoding and repeated reading,
• introduce games to facilitate phonemic awareness,
• connect to kids’ interests, apply multisensory tools and technology,
• always provide support.

If you don’t have enough time to proactively support your kid in increasing reading skills but want to see the results, check how tutoring works – try Brighterly platform and book 1st free reading class.

Frequently asked questions

What are foundational skills in reading?

Foundational reading skills are the skills that kids learn before 3rd grade and lay the base for the subsequent reading growth. In addition to the basic reading skills, foundational skills include alphabetic knowledge, oral language, print concepts, and high-frequency words.

How do you practice reading skills?

To practice reading skills, encourage kids to read regularly (up to 15 minutes a day), try active reading with note-taking, read aloud, analyse and summarize the texts, and work on expanding vocabulary.

Besides, in higher grades, a kid can practice reading by skimming or scanning and starting discussions after a reading session.

How to teach reading skills to kids?

To teach reading skills to kids, we recommend using tactics targeted at basic skills, ensuring daily reading practice, and creating experiences that engage kids to read. There, effectiveness depends on the grade and the kids’ reading needs.

Nevertheless, you can use shared experiences, whether it’s a reading aloud or decoding, encourage discussions, and casually use the 3-2-1 approach (name or write 3 things learnt upon reading)

How to improve critical reading skills?

To develop critical reading skills, focus on activities that encourage engaging with the text, its goals, ideas, and evidence, and its rhetorical devices. Developing reading skills in that case may include active reading via questioning the text, note-taking, reflecting, summarizing, and discussions.