Color De-Coding

Depending on your child's reading level, use color coding to help kids see patterns in spelling, vocabulary or grammar. For instance, if your child is learning to read, find an article in a magazine at home or print out a story on the computer that your child wants to read. Read the piece together and have your child highlight long vowels and short ones, then look at the piece as a whole and see what patterns they can find. (e.g. a silent e makes a vowel long, if you see “ght” at the end of the word, the “i” is long, if you only see one vowel in the word and it's at the end, the vowel is long.) If your child is older, color code word prefixes, roots and suffixes. Can s/he predict the meaning of each prefix/root/suffix based on the meaning of the whole word? See how close s/he came here. If your child is learning sentence structure, use the different highlighters to diagram parts of each sentence and illustrate the 10 basic sentence patterns found in English.