Fun Reading Activities to Improve Comprehension and Retention

Reading comprehension and retention are important skills that will provide a foundation for any child’s education.

Getting your child to enjoy reading while simultaneously improving their reading abilities can be a difficult task. You’ll need to find activities that stimulate and challenge your child’s reading ability that are fun enough to keep their interest.

Below are just a handful of possible reading activities that keep reading fun while promoting improved comprehension and retention:

• Use magnetic words to build phrases, paragraphs and stories. You can buy these or make your own out of strips of magnets. Gradually introduce more challenging words as you repeat the activity to build vocabulary.
• Play storytelling games to help spark your child’s imagination as well as their reading and writing abilities. Take turns writing new sentences of a single comprehensive story, and read them aloud as they’re written.
• Use instruction games to guide your child in drawing a picture as outlined by several sentences as text. Include some type of reward for a picture that closely matches the original.
• Play fill-in-the-word games with nursery rhymes or basic stories. Take ordinary stories and remove a handful of words, then ask your child to fill them in with his/her own choices, then read them aloud.
• Use newspapers as word-hunt opportunities. Select a few dozen words out of the newspaper and ask your child to hunt them down and highlight them. You could add a few variables in to make it more interesting, such as cutting out the newspaper words and using the leftover scraps for a new craft project.

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