I'm not sure how it happened but I almost missed National Book Month. The fact that January is National Book Month is something this book selling lady should not miss. Having a time during the year to focus on reading is a wonderful thing.
This fits in nicely with what we want to talk about today. How do we encourage our children to read for themselves? For some this is not an issue. Their children read, read, read. Their problem may be how to get their children to do things that need to be done instead of reading. For other children reading is hard work. Busy children may not want to stop long enough to sit and read. Struggling readers find reading a chore that does not bring pleasure. We need to look for interesting and creative ways to draw them into the wonderful world of books.
Here are some ideas that just might help.
1. Extend bedtime if your child is reading. When our children were young they were given an extra half hour with their light on if they were reading in bed. Even our non-reading young children would sit and look quietly at picture books, or other higher level books with good graphics. It was worth it to get to stay up later.
2. Find interesting books at the reading level of your student. If you have an older student who is not a strong reader then look for books that are classed as high interest low vocab. This simply means that the content should interest an older student but they have tried to keep the language simple enough for a struggling reader.
3. Consider graphic novels. These are novels that are more like large comic books. The graphics make the pages seem less intimidating and help to tell the story so that struggling readers can increase their comprehension. Often these are available for classic stories and adventure books.
4. Find some books on non-fiction topics that interest your students at their reading level. My boys were often more interested in reading for information than they were reading a fictional story. In many cases they would work extra hard to read because a book contained information that they wanted to find out about. Biographies of adventurous people were also more likely to grab their interest.
5. Have a family reading club. This was something we did on a fairly regular basis. We would set of a time period (often 4 weeks) where the kids had to read a certain number of books, at their level. If the goals were met then a reward was given. Goals were always geared to the abilitiy of the student and care was taken to make sure that they were achievable. We will talk about this in more detail in the future.
6. Choose a book to read with your child. Take turns reading. You read one page and they read the next one.
7. Consider trying something I call "tandem reading". In this case my reluctant reader and I would choose a simple story. My child would read and I would run my finger under the line of the sentence we were reading. As we went along they would read all the words they knew and I would fill in the ones they didn't know. Since we were homeschooling I had a very good idea of their capabilities and so I could fill in readily as we went. Over time we became very good at this. Since this was supposed to be a fun time we did not want to stop and sound out every unkown word, we just wanted to enjoy some time reading together where my student could practice what they knew without worrying about what they did not know.
These are just a few ideas to spice up reading time. May be you have some other ideas you could share.
Looking for some great books for your family? Check out our Library Builders at The Learning House.
"Unless the LORD builds the house, its builder labor in vain...." Psalms 127:1
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