Reading Activities Year 2: Fun Ways to Improve Reading Skills

Reading helps one to know about the places unvisited, the things unknown, the languages unheard, the people unseen, and the world beyond. Hence, it is preferable to cultivate the habit of reading among kids from an early age so that they can become incisive readers effortlessly. Various interesting reading activities, like guided reading sessions, using voice modulation while narrating stories, etc., make the task easier to instil the essence of reading into the young minds of kids in year 2. So, here’s a list of five top reading activities year 2 kids are likely to be fond of.

Read and Listen

Read out stories, poems, or any piece of text to your child every day to normalise reading as a daily activity. To encourage reading activities among year 2 kids, it is preferable to read out stories or poems that have dialogue. This type of reading material will provide you with more scope of voice modulation that amuses young kids. Once your kids are comfortable with you reading out various stories or poems every day, give them their turn to read. It is important to listen to them when they read out a text, for several reasons.

For example, if you choose to read out a dialogue between two speakers, read out the dialogues of speaker 1 and let your child read out the dialogues of speaker 2. When you listen to your child reading out the text, try to infer how he pronounces the syllables, whether he modulates his voice and follows the punctuations and the other minute details. 

Make Your Own Small Reading Club at Home

The best way to encourage your child for reading is to read with them. Make your very own reading club, with your children. When your kids will watch you enjoy reading as a leisure activity, they are more likely to be inclined to take interest in books. Instead of instructing them to read their books, make it a trend where you also sit with them and read a book. You may also invite their friends to your reading club so that they can look forward to reading as a fun activity.

To make your reading club full of interaction, make them discuss the stories or poems that they read. At the end of each session at your very own reading club, make sure that the kids get an opportunity to discuss what they read. This way they can get an insight of what the others have read and they may become interested in the other books.

Exploring Libraries and Book Shops

Image of a Library 

Before introducing any reading activities in year 2, let your kids cherish and enjoy the company of books. Year 2 kids are way too young to understand the significance of subjects or genres of books, so take the first step to let them explore books. You may take your kids to a local library and tell them how it works there. Walk them through the aisles of bookshelves at a library or a bookshop and explain how books are categorised there. Let them read a few pages of a book at the library or a bookshop. This will let them develop a better insight into books so that they can choose their own books. 

Guided Reading Sessions

As kids have a very short attention span, it is important to keep them happily engaged while reading any text. The guided reading sessions are just what you need to induce interest in reading among your kids. During these sessions, kids are provided a piece of text for reading along with a set of questions. The teacher who conducts a guided reading session asks these questions to the kids so as to encourage them to read with more concentration and find the required information in the text.

Image of a Paragraph along with fill-in the blanks for Guided Reading Sessions

For year 2 kids, the questions commonly asked in a guided reading session may require them to find the time of the day mentioned in the story, names of the characters, places, or seasons, given in the story, etc. Teachers may also ask questions that will require kids to make deductions, predictions, and inferences from the story. For example, they may ask kids to read the concluding part of the story and predict what might have happened next. Also, questions may require kids to read between the lines to judge a particular event or character in the story, thereby sketching their own inferences. Overall, guided reading sessions can be highly effective for kids to develop their reading and thinking skills. 

Use Actions While Reading

To ensure that reading does not get monotonous, it is important to implement fun activities from time to time. While you read out a story or a poem to your kids, try to use a few actions to depict objects or expressions. Ask your kids to use their hands and body to imitate a kettle or the actions of a teddy bear from the nursery rhymes. This will help them identify the things they read about and explore their imagination even better. Moreover, they will be engaged in reading activities more than ever with such fun actions.  

Conclusion

The reading activities discussed above are quite apt for the kids in year 2. However, the reading activities for kids of other age groups may differ from the above. For example, for the younger kids, the books that you choose must be full of colourful images or paper cut-out shapes to delight them. On the other hand, reading activities for the older kids may involve an eventful reading session or staging stories and plays with a make-believe set-up. Therefore, implement the reading activities for year 2 kids as well as for kids belonging to other grades and let kids enjoy reading.