Reading exercises for kids

Reading Worksheets | All Kids Network

Reading worksheets are the perfect tool to help your child develop a love for reading at an early age. By giving your child the basic tools they need to read at an early age, you can increase their chances of becoming a great reader. This collection of free reading worksheets covers a variety of subjects like alphabet recognition, phonics, sight words, comprehension and more. Each reading worksheet in this collection is easy to print in either color or black and white to meet your needs.

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Reading & Comprehension Worksheets - All Grades

An essential skill for all kids, reading expands comprehension and cultivates creativity and imagination. Reading worksheets for kids offer a great way to develop and improve reading skills.

Here are some interesting reading worksheets and reading activities to get the learning started!

Also browse through our vocabulary worksheets, alphabet worksheets, and English worksheets.

Reading Worksheets for Preschool

Classic Rhymes
Identifying the Letter 'C'

Reading Worksheets for Kindergarten

Read and Color
Rhyming Words - Dog
Rhyming Words - Tree
Rhyming Words - Cat
Rhyme and Match
Recognize the Rs
Learn the Letters E - H
Easy Reading - Short Vowel Sound I
Easy Reading - Short Vowel Sound A
Underline the Us
Find the Es
Find the Rhyme
Draw a Rhyme
Months’ Match-Up
Coloring Fun
Sorry, Wrong Sound
Crayon Colors
What’s the Sound?
Beginning Consonants - Worksheets
Beginning Consonant Blends Worksheets
Rhyming Pictures 1
Long Vowels - Silent-e
Long Vowel Combinations

Reading Worksheets for 1st Grade

Looks Can Deceive
Animal Families
Number the Story
Sight Words
Picture the Words
What Does the Picture Say?
Mixed-up Sentences
Word Jumble

Reading Worksheets for 2nd Grade

Fairy Tale Recipe
Dave the Brave
Digraph Bubbles
Rhyming Pictures 2
Amazing Blends
Locked Out
Trapping the Robbers: Adjectives
Trapping the Robbers: Word Meanings
Trapping the Robbers: Writing a Story
Trapping the Robbers: Scrambled Sentences
Test Your Word Power - III
Test Your Word Power - IV
Bingo the Storyteller
Dingo Tale
Getalong Gets Better
Getalong Gets Better: Word Meanings
Getalong Gets Better: Riddle Time
Getalong Gets Better: Word Quiz
Test Your Word Power - V
Test Your Word Power - VI
Fearless Fox and the Lion: Word Usage
Fearless Fox and the Lion: Word Meanings
Fearless Fox and the Lion: Jungle Trek
Fearless Fox and the Lion: The Adventure
What's the Good Verb? - I
What's the Good Verb? - II
A Day in the Life of Fearless: Word Usage
A Day in the Life of Fearless: Word Meanings
A Day in the Life of Fearless: Scrambled Sentences
A Day in the Life of Fearless: What's it Like?
Increase Your Verb Power: Word Usage
Increase Your Verb Power: Word Meanings
Increase Your Verb Power: Similar or Opposite?
Increase Your Verb Power: Analogies
Fearless Does It Again: The Jumbo Trap
Fearless Does It Again: Word Meanings
Fearless Does It Again: Finding the Lost City
Fearless Does It Again: Analogies

Reading Worksheets for 3rd Grade

Clear the Confusion
Of Bills and Bargains: Word Usage
Of Bills and Bargains: Word Meanings
Of Bills and Bargains: Similar or Opposite
Of Bills and Bargains: Descriptionary
Nounorama: Word Usage
Nounorama: Word Meanings
Nounorama: Similar or Opposite?
Nounorama: Jumbled Words
Wilma's Greeting: Reading Comprehension
Wilma's Greeting: Riddle Time!
Land Ahoy!: Word Usage
Land Ahoy!: Word Meanings
Land Ahoy!: Analogies
Land Ahoy!: The Pirates' Path

Reading Worksheets for 4th Grade

Frankie's Friends
Read Sylvia Plath
Spook Fest
Reading Comprehension

Reading Worksheets for 5th Grade

The Letter O
True or Not
What do You Like to Read

Fun Short Stories for Kids

Baby Blue's Day at the Zoo
Eleanor Has a Map
Frankie and CJ Take a Hike
Pierre and the Big Peach
Kisha's Big Job
Where is Hopsalot?
Frankie's Garden
Kisha Likes to Paint
CJ and the Chest of Gold
Eleanor and the Bluebird
Good Day for Music

Time for a Treehouse
Tweed's Treasure Hunt
Baby Blue's Magic Broom
Miggles and the Hungry Dragon
Camping in the Country
Miggles the Happy Camper
Baby Blue's Wish
No 'K' Corral
Unday
Count to Ten
Country Mouse, City Mouse
The Magic Tortilla
Two of Everything
Frog's Fiesta
Tante Odette
Three Strong Women
Anansi and the Visitor
Things Could Always Be Worse
Stone Soup

Importance of Reading

Reading is an important life skill that everyone needs to learn. Being a good reader helps you do better in school but the benefits of reading are not limited to better grades. Reading opens up multiple windows to the world around us; encouraging us to learn, enjoy and maybe even create something in turn. And while school may teach your child to read and write, home is the best place to encourage his love for reading. If your child is too young, you need to build his pre-reading skills by reading to him, letting him see and touch the pictures and singing songs and nursery rhymes to him.

Free Reading Worksheets for Kids

An excellent resource for all parents and teachers, worksheets are great for tracking the learning curve of kids. There are a host of free and printable reading worksheets available online for kids of all ages. These worksheets encourage quick learning and expand horizons as kids sharpen their reading and comprehension skills.

At JumpStart, you will find a host of exciting and interesting reading activities and worksheets. They serve as great teaching aids for parents and teachers who are looking for ways to improve their kids’ reading abilities. Essential to a child’s academic growth, reading skills are important to master at an early age.

Different Kinds of Reading Activities and Worksheets for Kids

Reading can be an extremely enjoyable activity for kids. It opens up the kids to a whole new world as they improve their vocabulary, spelling and grammar. Our reading worksheets instill in kids an interest and aptitude for reading. Encouraging kids to develop an interest in reading has many advantages. It helps them write, comprehend and express themselves better.

Additional information

11 fun activities to prepare your child for reading

Try these activities to teach your child the four key components of successful reading: understanding syllables, understanding words and sentences, rhyming, phonemic awareness.

We have prepared for you a colorful poster with these exercises for printing (download links below, under the text)!

1. Collect the word (Understanding syllables).

Explain that syllables are parts of words. Demonstrate by saying the word and pushing one block in a row accentuating each syllable. Gather the cubes back into a pile before saying the next word. Instead of blocks, you can give the children small paper squares for a group activity. Prepare a list of words to practice. For example, you can practice words related to something your child is currently learning.

2. What's in the box (Understanding syllables).

Collect several items in a box or basket. Be sure to include items that differ from each other in the number of syllables in their name. Invite the child to close their eyes, choose an item from the box, and name it (for example, “This is a pencil”). All children must repeat the name of the chosen subject and clap their hands, emphasizing each syllable. Then ask the class to say in chorus how many syllables they heard.

3. I went to the store (Rhymes).

Have students sit in a circle and give them something to throw, such as a small ball or a pillow. To start the game, say "I went to the store to buy meat", then toss the ball to the student. The student should repeat the phrase and add a rhyming word at the end, for example: “I went to the store to buy kvass (or a vase, lasso, blot, etc.)”. Then the student should throw the ball back to the teacher, who repeats the original phrase with a new word that needs to come up with a rhyme (for example, “I went to the store to buy cheese (or fat, kefir, figs”). Maintain a fast pace so that the children do not lose interest.

4. The ship is loaded ... (Rhymes).

Have the children sit in a circle and make sure you have something to throw, such as a ball or pillow. To start the game, say "The ship is loaded with cheese." Then throw the ball to one of the students. This student must come up with a rhyme (for example, “The ship is loaded with kefir”) and throw the ball back to you. After repeating the original phrase, throw the ball to another child. Continue the game in this way until the children run out of rhymes. Then name another cargo on the ship and continue the game. Come up with new game situations to expand the list of possible rhymes.

5. Listen to the words in a sentence (Understanding words and sentences).

Give each child six or seven bricks, Lego bricks, or construction paper squares that they will use to represent the words in the sentence you will make for them, one brick for each word. Brainstorm with the children by showing them how to repeat your sentences to themselves, word by word, with clear pauses between each sentence. Invite the children to arrange the blocks in order from left to right so that they begin to master the orientation. After they have laid out the blocks, have the students repeat your sentence, pointing to each block as they say the word it represents.

6. Name the animals (phonemic perception).

Use animal cards or photos cut from magazines. Give the students pictures and ask them to name the animals. Ask: “What sound do you hear at the beginning/end of this animal’s name?” This game can be expanded with more pictures on different topics and students can play it in pairs.

"Thanks to advances in neuroscience and technology, not only do we now understand why experienced readers read well and others struggle with reading, but we can also help any reader on their journey from early language acquisition to reading and reading comprehension “It all happens in the brain!”

7.

Have the children sit in a circle and say, "Guess whose name I'm going to say now." Then choose one of the students and clearly pronounce only the initial phoneme of his name. For names that begin with a plosive consonant, such as Danya, the phoneme must be repeated over and over again, clearly and distinctly: “/d/ /d/ /d/ /d/ /d/”. Fricative consonants should be stretched and repeated (for example, “/s-s-s-s/ / s-s-s-s / /s-s-s-s/ /s-s-s-s /”). If several children's names start with the same phoneme, have the children guess all the possible options. This will show the children that each phoneme appears in many different words.

8. Simple words (Isolation and identification of phonemes).

Give yourself and each child three colored cubes. Begin by saying a two-letter word (such as "yes"), clearly separating it into parts: "y ... a." Ask the children to repeat what you said. Then all children have to represent the word with two blocks of different colors to show that it consists of two sounds. Further explain that words can consist of more than two sounds. To demonstrate this, say the word “gift,” “d...a...r,” and have the children repeat the word in unison. To represent the third phoneme, place a new block to the right of the other two blocks, saying the entire word, phoneme by phoneme, pointing to each block in turn from left to right.

9. Funny words (Isolation and identification of phonemes).

Show the children the sound and ask them to substitute it for the sound at the beginning of their names or any other words. The teacher might say, “A funny sound is /b/. Change the first sound in your name to /b/”, for example, Masha will become Basha, and Stas will become Btas.

10. Conversation with the robot (phoneme fusion).

Pronounce the word, stretching it out, pausing about a second between each phoneme. Then ask students to repeat the whole word to you. For example, when a teacher says: “/h/.../e/.../r/... /n/. ../s/.../d/”, students respond: “Black!”

11. Head-girdle-legs (Segmentation of phonemes).

This is a great activity to help students identify inner sounds. Say a three-sound word, such as "cheese." Students then stand up and touch their heads with the first sound (/s/), their belts with the second sound (/s/), and their toes with the last sound (/p/). Then touch your belt again and ask, "What sound is that?" Continue practicing sounds in positions that are difficult for students to identify on their own.

Does your child have a reading disability?

Thanks to the FAST FORWORD method, the child will catch up with the age norm in reading in just 20-40 hours of play-activities!

Learn more about the methodology and sign up for online trial classes, help your child overcome reading difficulties quickly and permanently!

LEARN MORE

You can print the 11 Fun Reading Activities for Kids poster in high resolution and display it in a prominent place in your home or daycare to follow these simple yet important guidelines were always in front of my eyes.

Click on the pictures below to download.

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How easy it is to teach a child 4-6 years old to read - the best methods and exercises there is no ready-made answer, but we want to immediately warn against two misconceptions:

“It is not necessary to teach a child to read at home, they will teach you at school anyway.” Yes, they will. But remember: the first year at school is the most intense in all 11 years of study. For some 4-5 months in the 1st grade, the child goes through the alphabet "from" and "to", learns to read, write, and the rest of the time he studies the basics of the Russian language. Therefore, it will be great if he has a reading skill before school. This will reduce the burden on the child.
"There is no time to waste - the sooner the baby begins to read, the better." All children are different and develop at their own pace. Therefore, you should not impose teaching reading to a preschooler as soon as he is 4-5 years old, if the student himself does not yet show interest in this activity. Instead, you can begin to develop an interest in reading through bright and engaging books. A good option would also be games that involve letters.

The indicator to be guided by is not the age of the preschooler, but his speech skills.

It's time to learn to read if…

If the speech development of a preschooler proceeds without gross violations. Let's figure out what criteria will help you find out if a child is ready to learn to read:

Understanding addressed speech. The kid must understand sentences, phrases, individual words that others around him turn to.
Vocabulary. The more words a child knows, the better he will understand what he read. It will also help him communicate with adults and other children.
Grammar. The ability to correctly build sentences, select and change words is important for children who are learning to read.
Pronunciation. For learning to be effective, the child must know how to pronounce words without gross errors.

Remember: at preschool age, a child may have minor flaws in grammar and pronunciation - this is normal. Over time, these violations will be corrected, and they should not be considered an obstacle to reading. But if the baby is not yet very confident in speaking, do not rush him to read - this will not help develop speech, but only demotivate.

Practicing child psychologist Ekaterina Murashova

Free course for modern moms and dads from Ekaterina Murashova. Sign up and participate in the drawing of 8 lessons

How to make learning to read easier for preschoolers

Praise more and never scold

It's hard for us adults to imagine how difficult it really is for a baby to learn from scratch such a complex skill as reading. After all, being able to read means being able to correlate a sound with a letter or a combination of letters, connect sounds, understand the meanings of the words read and the meaning behind the text.

If parents take the child's progress for granted and express dissatisfaction when the child does not understand something, this will not push the future student to development, but will only complicate the process. Therefore, it is important to praise for small victories: I learned the letter that was passed last time - great, I coped without my father's help with the word as much as two syllables - clever.

Do not take failures as a consequence of the negligence of the little student. When a child does not understand the first time, this is an occasion to look for another explanation or give more time to practice. If you feel tired and irritated, you should stop the activity and return to it in a good mood.
Exercise little but regularly

Do not expect perseverance and a desire to spend hours figuring out unfamiliar letters from your baby. It is difficult for preschoolers to keep their attention in a lesson for more than 25 minutes, and even such small classes should be interrupted with physical education minutes and games so that the child does not get bored. This is exactly how Skysmart prepares for school: 25-minute classes with breaks for outdoor games.

But regular practice is important - much more important than the duration of the session. And it doesn’t have to be just lessons: you can look for familiar letters on signs during a walk, on a door plate in a children’s clinic, on a package of your favorite corn flakes.
Read books aloud

In a series of studies conducted by Dr. Victoria Purcell-Gates among five-year-olds who could not yet read, those children to whom their parents regularly read aloud for two years expressed their thoughts in more literary language, built longer phrases and used more complex syntax.

In addition, reading aloud with adults contributed to the expansion of children's vocabulary, as parents explained the meaning of new words that children did not encounter in everyday life.

Expert Opinion

According to neuroscientist Marianne Wolfe, book evenings with parents help develop a love of reading, because the child establishes a connection between reading aloud and feelings of love and warmth.

Discuss read

The role of communication in teaching literacy cannot be overestimated. At first, it is important to ask if the future student is interested, if he is tired, what was remembered from the lesson. When a preschooler learns to read coherent texts, be sure to ask questions about their content.

It's great if the child reads on his own and without the prompting of the parents, but even in this case, do not deprive him of the opportunity to discuss what he has read with you. For example, you can ask:
- Which of the characters do you like?
- Do you think this character is like you? Would you like to be like her?
- What would you do if you were a hero?
- Why did the described event happen? How are these two events related?
- How did what you read make you feel?
- What do you remember most from what you read?
- What do you think the author wanted to teach? Why did he write this? Do you agree with the author?

It is important to select questions individually, based on the age of the child. With younger children, discuss everything together, ask simple questions, direct their attention to some facts. The complexity of the questions should increase in proportion to the age of the child. The older he is, the more difficult the tasks should be, and the questions can already affect the "reflection" of their feelings and experiences.

Go from simple to complex

From the correspondence between sounds and letters to syllables, from short words to longer and more complex words. It would seem that this is obvious, but no: sometimes parents are so happy with the success of the child at first that they push him to study more complex topics than he is ready to accept. Of course, the program should adapt to the future student, but you should not skip steps, even if the child is making progress.

There are methods that offer to teach a child to read by memorizing whole words. Alas, experiments show that such techniques generally work worse. For example, a group of scientists from the United States came up with an artificial alphabet and offered subjects to learn it, and then read the words written using this alphabet. At the same time, some subjects were immediately explained the principles of correspondence between sounds and letters, while others had to derive reading rules on their own based on whole words. It turned out that the first group copes with reading new, previously unfamiliar words better than the second.

Therefore, we advise choosing those teaching methods that involve clear instructions about the relationship between sound and letter - and this is especially important for those children who have difficulty reading. Below we have compiled a few of these techniques that you can use to teach your preschooler at home.

Methods of teaching preschoolers to read

Warehouse reading

The way to teach a child to read through warehouses was actually used in Rus', but for modern parents this technique is associated with the name of the philologist Nikolai Aleksandrovich Zaitsev.

Zaitsev suggests not focusing on the study of individual letters, as it can be difficult for students to understand how letters can merge into syllables and words. Teaching a child to read by syllables is also not always easy: one syllable can be quite long ( glitter, ruble ), and the boundaries of syllables are not obvious ( Lun-tik or Lu-ntik ?). Therefore, in Zaitsev's methodology, a warehouse is used as the main unit.

Warehouse can be a combination of a consonant and a vowel (pa-pa, ma-ma), a single consonant or vowel (de- d , i-s -li, A -le-sha), as well as a combination of a consonant with a hard or soft sign (ma- l -chi-k, po- d -yem).

In order for a preschooler to understand the differences between the recording of voiced and soft, vowel and consonant sounds, different types of warehouses have their own cube size, color and content, due to which the cubes sound when they are shaken. Cubes affect several channels of perception at once, and warehouses should not just be pronounced, but sung - this way, according to the author of the methodology, learning is more interesting and effective.

One of the advantages of the technique is that children willingly play with blocks themselves, and the process of learning to read becomes active, mobile.

Syllabic reading

This technique, according to some sources, was developed by the Romans. Later, Nadezhda Sergeevna Zhukova, a Soviet and Russian speech therapist, created a primer based on it. In it, she built her own system in which sounds and letters are sequentially introduced into speech.

Due to the fact that the concept of a syllable is introduced at an early stage, it is faster and easier to teach a child to read syllables together. By the way, as in Zaitsev's technique, it is proposed to sing syllables, and not just pronounce them.

Based on the syllabic method, Zhukova developed a set of teaching aids - copybooks, copybooks and a book for reading. Benefits will help teach children to read correctly 6 and 7 years old at home.

Both techniques for teaching preschoolers to read are used in the Skysmart Ready for School course. The course consists of two stages: first, children get acquainted with letters and warehouses, which allows them to quickly start reading simple words, and then they learn what a syllable is. Gradually, we introduce more complex syllabic constructions, move on to reading phrases and sentences.

Sound analytical-synthetic teaching method

This method originated in the USSR and is still considered the main one in Russian schools and kindergartens. It was developed by the Soviet teacher and Russian language methodologist Voskresenskaya Alexandra Ilyinichna.

Like N.S. Zhukova, Voskresenskaya proposed her own order in which children should learn letters and sounds. The principle of this sequence was that the child first learned the letters that can be combined into simple syllables, and then moved forward in the level of complexity. As a result, children learn syllables in this order:

Two-letter syllables (including one consonant): am, ma, ra, etc. and simple words from them: ra-ma, ma-sha, Pa-sha, etc.
Three-letter syllables with a vowel in the center: poppy, lat, etc.
The combination of the first two stages into words: sa-lat, earth-la, etc.
Words of three syllables and six letters: az-bu-ka, ve-se-lo, etc.
Words of two syllables and six letters: question-ros, tea-nick, etc.
Words with a combination of vowels at the beginning and end of the word: chair, March, etc.

In this way, children simultaneously prepare for more complex syllables at each stage and reinforce what they have learned earlier.

Exercises for learning to read

Learning to read usually takes place in several stages. First, the child listens to the sound, visually remembers the letters. Different games will help with this, where you need to look for letters, invent words, etc. When this stage is over, you can move on to syllables and games to work them out. And only after that it will be possible to proceed to words, and then to sentences and texts.

Letter memory exercises

The first step is to teach your child to recognize letters. To do this, you can use pictures with hidden letters. We use such exercises in the preparation for school lessons in Skysmart.

Ask your child to identify what letter a word begins with, or name as many words as possible that begin with a certain letter.

Next, we train to distinguish correctly written letters from incorrect ones. This is also important for learning to write: preschoolers often mirror letters or distort individual elements.

Exercises for vowels and consonants

To learn how to distinguish between vowels and consonants, tasks will help you determine the sound with which a word begins.

It will also help to remember the difference between vowels and consonants and search for an extra letter.

Word Building Exercises

When your child can read short words, have him or her make a word out of the letters on their own.

Composing words from syllables is convenient if you have cubes at hand, but you can also try on paper.

Another good exercise is to fill in the missing letter in a word.