New Year, New Chapters Easy Resolutions for Young Readers
With a new year comes new goals, new experiences, and new opportunities to make reading fun for everyone in your family. As you create your resolutions for 2026, don’t forget to include literacy goals for both you as a parent and your little learner. Whether it’s making time daily to read aloud or completing a fun reading challenge together, setting reading goals can keep your child motivated and on track to improve their skills. MAKE THEM SMART SCHOLARS. One of the best ways to ensure you and your family accomplish your reading resolutions is to use the SMART method. Choose specific goals, like reading a chapter each week or visiting the library once a month. Find a way to measure your progress, like creating a sticker chart where every time your child completes a reading task, they get to put up a sticker for the day. Make sure goals are realistically achievable, considering your
child’s age, ability, and challenges. Keep the objectives relevant to your child’s interests to help them stay engaged. You should also set a time frame for each goal you want to accomplish together. READ MORE PAGES. “Reading more” is a great goal, but it may feel daunting for children struggling with words. Using the SMART method, you can make that target more manageable by resolving to “read more pages” or a certain number of pages in a set time. Page goals help break up books into smaller chunks, making it easier for your child to achieve small wins that may motivate them to keep going. EXPLORE LIFE THROUGH LITERACY. Books can help your child learn about every topic under the sun, and you can all aim to explore life through reading this year. Set goals to read a book by a local author, a nonfiction
book, a friend’s favorite read, or something about a different country. Challenge them to read materials that aren’t traditional books, like comic books, signs at a museum, or an age-appropriate magazine article. If building literacy skills and a love of reading is on your family’s New Year’s resolutions list this year, The Reading Ranch can help you achieve each of them. Contact us today.
Get to the Heart of Every Story Teaching Kids to Spot a Book’s Central Message
CAN THEY FIND REPEATED WORDS? While your little learner searches for the main idea, one of the clues is recurring words or phrases. The more a word or term appears in a story, the more likely it is to be related to the core theme. If, for example, your child spots the word “school” repeatedly, the main idea of the text is probably about education or the classroom. As you read together, prompt your child to write down any words or sentences they notice that keep coming up. Ask them if they can tell the main idea by looking at their list of repeated phrases. WHICH SENTENCES ARE IMPORTANT? Authors often use the first and last sentences of paragraphs to introduce or sum up the central themes of the text. First sentences,
For young readers, there’s a lot happening in a book, from multiple characters to more complex concepts. Each story has a main idea, and being able to identify it is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. As children develop deeper literacy skills, they’ll need to learn how to find the central theme by looking at patterns and relationships within the text. It takes patience, focus, and the ability to distinguish between the main idea and a story’s many other supporting details. WHAT MAKES A MAIN IDEA? A story has two prevailing themes that kids must be able to differentiate: the subject and the main idea. The subject is the general topic, and the main idea represents the author’s point or specific message about the subject.
or topic sentences, are a way to clue the reader into what’s next and hint at the main message. Have your child pay extra attention to these sentences, asking them to reread each. Talk about any patterns or topics those sentences focus on to see if your child can determine what the author wants them to know most. Finding the main idea of a book is an essential use of reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. At The Reading Ranch, we know how to help children spot the central theme of a story, enabling them to engage with books even more meaningfully. Contact us to learn more about how we can help.
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