A lot of my feelings about reading are driven by the fact that I was an early reader that just got sent to the library for the first three years of school, and I feel like I missed learning that I needed. My daughter was an early reader and I don't see much reading instruction in school for her either. Based on my experience I believe that kids need to do more than just read if they're going to get the comprehension, vocabulary and inference skills, etc. that hit them at their personal growth level--they need to discuss what they read, and I don't believe that advanced readers get much of that at school.
You don't say where your child is in reading. I used the Scholastic chart. When my daughter was very young and learning to read, I had her read books to me and it was easy to see if it was too hard/too easy. I think I did that up through level K-ish? Once she started really reading I think there's a place in there where parents don't know what to do. She went from K-ish to Captain Underpants and I had no idea what she was getting out of it, but she didn't have the reading stamina to read full chapters out loud to me. So what we did was let her read whatever she wanted (we skimmed for content we didn't want her exposed to) and then we read to her at night, with her reading paragraphs or pages out loud, like others suggest.
Once they've actually learned to read, if the kids are reading above level and don't get much reading instruction in school, having parents read out loud at night is a great way for it to happen. You can have conversations about the book and make sure the child understands the vocabulary and ideas and all that stuff you can easily skip over when you are just reading a book alone.
Right now my husband is reading the Susan Cooper series to her. She loves it, but if she were reading it alone, there is so much she wouldn't catch.
She also reads whatever she wants during the day. It kind of drives me crazy because all these series books are predictable and it just gets to be like TV sitcoms. Right now she's into these Warrior cat clan books and there are like 90 of them!! So every once in a while I take her to the bookstore award winning shelf and encourage her to pick something else, but reading at night is where the good books always come in because the rule is that we all three have to like them.
I still use that Scholastic chart to get some warnings. Recently she read a book called "Walk two Moons" and the chart rating didn't match the text. It seemed easier. So I looked into it and learned that the structure was complex and that's why the reading level was high. That gave me the opportunity to check in and make sure she understood the structure (she did). But the symbolism was something else--she really didn't appreciate it the way a fifth or sixth grader would. I wouldn't have looked into that book if the chart rating didn't surprise me, so I think those things are valuable. But for what it is worth, if we're reading as a family at night, I don't care if she doesn't fully get the symbolism in a beautiful book. She'll appreciate it more next year because she will be more ready, not based on what they do at school but on what we read together at night.
