How to Get Kids to Read--Part 1

What’s the best way to teach a kid (not the baby goat, but the human child) to enjoy reading? Why is it important for a child to enjoy reading? Is it ever too late to get a kid hooked on reading?

Too late? My husband was 25 when he and I married. He hated reading. It only took me two months to get him hooked. It’s never too late.

Why is it important? If a child enjoys reading, he’ll read more. If he reads more, he expands his vocabulary and his knowledge base. In short, he expands his world. Want a more concrete reason? Children who enjoy reading get better grades.

“But how do I get him to enjoy reading? He hates his school textbooks!”

Heck, can you blame him? I hate textbooks, too. In fact, I hated history in school because we learned about it through textbooks. It wasn’t until my last year of college, when I discovered that you could learn about history from sources other than textbooks, that I learned to love it. Textbooks should be outlawed! What an awful way to teach a child to read. What an awful way to teach a child anything! My children didn’t like reading textbooks. They still don’t. Fortunately, that wasn’t their first experience with reading. I read to them from the time they were born. When they were infants, I chose books with bright, interesting pictures. As toddlers and preschoolers, I added stories that were interesting and easy for them to follow, like Where's My Teddy? and Miss Spider's Tea Party . As they got older and developed their own interests, I chose books that I thought they would enjoy. I didn’t care if it was an award-winning book. In fact, most of the Caldecott books I’ve seen haven’t done a thing for me. The Newberry books usually have a pretty good story, but they often take a while for my child to “get in to.” For instance, my son read Johnny Tremain , a Newberry winner, in 5th grade. I’d remembered reading this book when I was in 5th grade. I loved it then and was excited that I could share this with my son. But Johnny Tremain is slow to start, and my son was having trouble getting in to it. So, I sat down with him, and we took turns reading the first few chapters out loud—no more than one chapter a day. After a few chapters, he didn’t want to quit reading, so he took the book to his room and continued on his own. We did this with many of the assigned books for his elementary and middle school English classes. He’s a senior in high school now, and while we don’t read aloud to each other, I will sometimes read one of his assigned novels, so I can discuss it with him.

Books he selected on his own or books I selected for him have often kept him up all night. Science fiction, action adventure, mysteries. Animorphs, a series of science fiction novels for young adults, isn’t the most literary of works out there. But my son loved that series, and it got him to read. He consumed them in one sitting.

That’s all for today. More tips tomorrow.