Parents have grown increasingly aware of the importance of having their children acquire good reading skills at an early age. This can often mean the difference between a child excelling or having difficulty at every phase of learning that follows. Not surprisingly, Kumon Reading is our fastest growing program.

Kumon Reading is a balanced program representing the best practices in reading instruction. It's designed to develop core skills, from understanding the sounds that make up words to the summary and critique of complex reading passages.  Kumon students ultimately learn to comprehend a wide variety of texts, and gain the fluency needed to compose clear and correct language.

Good writing and speaking skills are fostered as a natural outgrowth of the Kumon Reading curriculum. Kumon students at every level read daily. That alone confers enormous benefits.

Areas covered by Kumon Reading include:

• Pre-reading skills
• Phonics
• Vocabulary building
• Grammar and Punctuation
• Reading Comprehension

Who goes to Kumon reading?

• Students wishing to enhance their vocabulary and comprehension
• Children having difficulty acquiring reading and writing skills at school
• Pre-readers or early readers seeking a head start or supplement

A Well-Rounded Approach

Kumon takes a more balanced approach to reading than many other programs.  While educators continue to debate whether sounding out words is a more effective strategy than recognizing them by sight, Kumon combines the best of both practices.  The Reading Program uses authentic literature and skills instruction to develop the language skills of each individual student.  As a result, reading and writing skills are developed concurrently.  Later, fundamentals like sentence structure, grammar, and punctuation are introduced in the context of reading exercises and supplemental reading so that children continually build their vocabulary and strengthen their comprehension.  In this way, the program sequentially nurtures the skills and critical reasoning abilities they'll need to identify, organize, express, and interpret written ideas.  These are precisely the tools they'll need to cope with critical reading at the high school level, and beyond.

Building Comprehension Comprehensively

Kumon students learn by reading short excerpts from respected sources, often award-winning literature, and completing a variety of exercises that may ask them to draw comparisons or contrasts, interpret text or pursue a line of reasoning, apply vocabulary, even analyze the author's intentions or stylistic devices.  Students work toward an understanding of intricate passages and the ability to summarize them accurately.  They are continually exposed to and engaged by rich and varied material that they may very well encounter in school English courses.

The Skills that Keep on Giving

Of course, the advantages of developing the critical skills nurtured by Kumon go far beyond the school subject of English.  Such skills are ultimately required for every academic subject your child will pursue and are also extremely useful in important test-taking situations like the SAT or ACT.

How Do the Reading Worksheets Work?

The Kumon Reading curriculum consists of five major blocks, such as "Sentence Building."  Each level within a block contains 200 Worksheets covering a number of topics like "subject and predicate."  Several sets of Worksheets under each topic introduce, apply, and reinforce specific key concepts in a sequence.  Students typically complete one set each day in the initial stages of the program.  Each worksheet may take one or two minutes to complete, and the entire set ten to twenty minutes, depending on the child's proficiency with the material.

The Kumon Reading Levels:

Word Building

• Look, listen & repeat
• Reciting words with pictures
• Letter sounds
• Consonant combinations & vowel sounds
• Advanced vowel sounds & advanced sounding out
• Function of words, reading aloud

Sentence Building

• Sentence structure, sentence topics, thought sequence
• Subject & predicate
• Comparing & contrasting
• Constructing sentences

Paragraph Building

• Organizing information
• Combining sentences
• Main idea & paragraphs
• Clauses
• Reason & result

Summary

• Referring words, interpreting text & paraphrase
• Point making, theme & story elements
• Summation
• Persuasion

Critique

• Critical reading
• Elements of literature
• Interpretation

Kumon offers a Recommended Reading List of books for each level of the Reading Program, and many of these books are available for checkout at our Center.