Show your child the thought processes, by thinking-aloud while read­ing a pas­sage from her favorite book, and explain how they helped under­stand the story bet­ter. Give your child oppor­tu­ni­ties to prac­tice thinking-aloud.

Read­ing com­pre­hen­sion involves recog­ni­tion of words and asso­ci­at­ing them with con­cepts to develop mean­ing­ful ideas. Chil­dren develop wider read­ing habits by under­stand­ing let­ters that rep­re­sent spe­cific sounds and spellings that are related to speech sounds in sys­tem­atic ways.

Using a the­matic approach, pre­dict­ing the mean­ings of words, devel­op­ing wordlists of unfa­mil­iar words, using vocab­u­lary and learn­ing the mean­ings of words from word parts are ways to build a bet­ter vocabulary.

Using a dic­tio­nary, learn­ing how to lis­ten care­fully, learn­ing how to spell based on rules and pat­terns, keep­ing a list of dif­fi­cult words and mnemon­ics are ways to improve spelling.

Mis­pro­nun­ci­a­tion, poor enun­ci­a­tion, errors such as adding a syl­la­ble, omit­ting a sound or sub­sti­tut­ing a sound, hasty read­ing, not learn­ing to spell by read­ing, fail­ing to note the cor­rect spelling, and rare or unusual words may cause misspelling.

Rules, alpha­bets and sounds, homonyms and homo­phones, and mean­ing and pro­nun­ci­a­tion make spelling challenging.