(This is one of several answer to the question, "What can I do at home to help my child with reading?")

The I-Read, You-Read Game

Use a book that your child is supposed to be reading for homework, or a book your child has read before, or a book your child has not read before that is at the right level.

For grade 1 and grade 2, use a Frog and Toad or other book by Arnold Lobel, or a favorite

For grade 3, use an Amelia Bedelia or a Fancy Nancy, or anything by Ezra Jack Keats, or a favorite 

For grades 4 and 5, use whatever book they are currently reading

Rules:

a.     Child reads a page to you

b.     You retell or summarize that page in a sentence (or two) out loud (not in writing)

c.      You read a page to the child

d.     The child retells or summarizes the page

Keep going until you have read for 20 minutes or until the book is finished, whichever happens first (likelier in the youngest grades to come to the end of the book first!) or until each of you has had as many turns as the child is old.

People ask me why, since I have officially retired from First Grade, why do I continue to go to school and volunteer in classrooms??

"Because," I answer, "I like to watch children growing and learning how to use their brains."

So far this year, since September 2013, I have been hanging out in three classes:  one Kindergarten, where growth is very rapid and obvious; one fourth grade, where the light bulbs flash bright-green neon when they come on; and one first grade, where the washing-machine theory of child development is clearly at work.

Washing machines have a built-in timing mechanism that tells the machine how long the water should run in, how long the clothes should swish around in it, how long the emptying and filling again and rinsing and spinning should take.  This may be clear to the mechanical mind inside the machine, but it is totally random and inexplicable to me.

When I was younger, I did my family's laundry every Saturday at the Belfast (ME) laundromat. I put the clothes in, put in all the quarters, started the four machines, and went off the the grocery store.  Thirty minutes later I put the groceries in the car and came back to the laundromat to start the dryers.

Sometimes the washers were all done.  Often, though, they weren't, so I had to wait for them to finish. Each machine's timing was different, and there was no pattern that I could discern, either for them all or for any one.  I picked one to watch.

There would be a click, and then another click, and I could see the control button shift slightly with each click; then there would be some time -- maybe a whole minute -- before the next click.  I would watch this incomprehensible progression of clicks and wait times, often for another five minutes, until at last there was one more unpredictable clock and the whole machine shuddered to a stop. 

Children learn like that, I have found, on their own timing and in their own inexplicable way. There is, of course, more similarity among four washing machines than among any four children, so watching the thirty children in my first grade move through their developmental clicks was way more complex and varied than anything mechanical. Children are more fascinating, too, than any machine could ever be.