Hoot Reading Blog

Heroes come in all sizes, shapes, colours, genders and ages! Many popular stories develop their themes around the hero! In our culture, we celebrate the heroes in our everyday lives. We hear about the incredible acts of heroes everyday on the news, TV, and social media. Introducing A Heroes’ Journey, as the theme and focus of your child’s next book selection will provide motivation for the young reader. Heroes exist in non-fiction and fiction literature through fairy tales, fables, historical fiction, biographies and autobiographies. These very different genres provide a rich pathway into the development of a character in terms of their growth as a hero, through identifying their qualities, level of sacrifice, show of bravery, choices made, and connection to human relationships. The finale of reading and analyzing the hero book or hero comic book of your child’s choice is to allow your child to identify the hero within and the people in their own nuclear family. Have them choose a product to exhibit their understanding of the archetypal study of a hero by drawing a poster, painting a picture, or writing a letter to their hero, or lyrics to a song about heroes. 

One way to engage readers over the summer months is to work on comprehension skills. Fairy tales are one of the many forms of literature that fall into the public domain, allowing rewriting and modification to occur without copyright infringement. There are countless versions of Cinderella for example, that we’ll be using in our fairy tale comparison comprehension activity.

Everybody has heard of the frightening research that supports how students are at risk of losing anywhere from 20%-50% of their skills learned during a school year while on summer break. “It is widely understood that on average students lose academic ground during the summer, a phenomenon frequently referred to as “summer learning loss” or “summer slide” (Kuhfeld 2018). While the need to maintain academic skills is paramount, it is just as important that kids be free to explore the fresh air of the outdoors, so why not combine both!

“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world- Love of books is the best of all.”

A Note to Parents

If you want to work on reading at home, but are stuck for ideas, we’ve created an easy reading game that you can print out and play with your kids one evening or weekend! Rhyming Bingo provides a fun twist on standard sight word bingo that will stretch newer readers. Rhyming Bingo helps kids become more familiar with foundational sight words and their understanding of how the vowel teams and word families work together. The ability to identify and create rhymes is an important component of healthy phonological awareness. These two particular sets of Bingo Cards are for children in Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten, but keep checking back for future activities for older kids. 

As adults, when it comes to reading, a lot of us think we have it figured out because we’ve been doing it for most of our lives. However, when we start to work with or raise children it can often manage to become a challenging and elusive skill – especially if you have a struggling reader in front of you! 

Does anyone else still have to silently sing the alphabet song in their head to figure out the alphabetical order? We all know that song, especially if we work with or have young children. When we start the journey of developing a reader and literate member of society, everything initially hinges on that song. We sing it in the bath, in the car, in the stroller, at the table – absolutely everywhere until we make sure that kid knows it no matter what.

It is that time of year for parents and teachers – report cards and parent-teacher interviews. For many parents, this is an exciting time to hear directly from your teachers on how your child is adjusting to their grade, what they have been learning, where their strengths lie and where they may be struggling.