Helping Your Child at Home | Slant System

Helping Your Child at Home

For Parents

Supporting a child’s reading journey at home is less about “drilling” and more about fostering a genuine connection with language. Since you are exploring the Slant System, you likely already know the value of a structured, multimodal approach.

Here is a list of practical tips to support your child’s literacy development at home:

Practical Tips

Create a “Print-Rich” Environment

Children become readers when they see that reading is a useful, everyday tool, not just a school subject.

  • Keep Books Accessible: Have a basket of books in the car, by their bed, and even in the kitchen.
  • Model the Behavior: Let your child see you reading—whether it’s a novel, a cookbook, or a manual.

Master the “Read Aloud”

Reading to your child is the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading.

  • The “Picture Walk”: Before reading, flip through the pages. Ask, “What do you think is happening here?” to build prediction skills.
  • Focus on Fluency: Use different voices for characters. This demonstrates how expression and pacing (prosody) change the meaning of a story.
  • Interactive Reading: Don’t just read at them. Ask “Why” and “How” questions to build background knowledge, which is crucial for comprehension. Read more in this Blog

Use Multimodal Techniques

Following the Orton-Gillingham approach, engaging multiple modalities by seeing, hearing, saying, and doing, helps “lock in” learning.

  • Air Writing: Have your child write tricky letters or words in the air using their whole arm.
  • Sand or Salt Trays: Let them trace letters in a thin layer of sand or salt. The tactile feedback helps with muscle memory.
  • Sound Scavenger Hunts: Ask them to find three things in the room that start with the “sh” sound or the “b” sound.

Support Decoding (Not Guessing)

When your child hits a word they don’t know, avoid the urge to say “look at the picture” or “guess.” Instead:

  • Tap it Out: Have them tap their fingers for each individual sound (phoneme) they hear in the word.
  • Look for “Chunks”: Help them find smaller words or patterns they recognize within the bigger word (e.g., “ing” or “at”).
  • Use Visual Aids: Use resources like b/d reversal posters or blending mats to help them navigate common stumbling blocks.

Play with Language

Phonological awareness—the ability to hear and manipulate sounds—can be practiced anywhere, even in the dark!

  • Rhyming Games: “I’m thinking of a word that rhymes with cat and you wear it on your head.”
  • Syllable Clapping: Clap out the parts of their favorite foods (e.g., “ap-ple” = 2 claps, “bac-on” = 2 claps).
  • Sound Swapping: “What happens to the word top if we change the /t/ to a /p/?” (Pop!)

More Resources

Find more great resources on our partner pages:

Independent Slant System™ Tutors