Ideas to Encourage a Love of Reading

This is primarily the parents’ responsibility.

1. Make library day a big deal. Your enthusiasm can be contagious. Get your children their own library cards and give them each a book bag for library books only. Teach them how to use the resources at the library. If you don’t know how to use the resources, ask for a “tour”.

2. Create a family reading time after dinner for 30 minutes. Let them pick their own reading material from a list you’ve already approved. You could also let them roam the library and find their own treasures. Make sure you overlook and find nothing objectionable.

3. Direct your children to good literature. Develop a book list based on their own interests.

4. For some children, TV, computer and video games are more tasteful. Think of those things as candy. Yes, we’d rather eat candy, but our minds must feast on healthy food and we should choose to limit the junk food. Let your children develop a taste for literature. Perhaps start with magazines which interest them. Books on tape are good and can occupy more than one child at a time. If developing a taste for literature is new in your home, be careful not to push your children past their own comfortable reading levels.

5. Read to your children. Read, read, read, read, read. Read to your readers every day. When you read, do it expressively. Vary the books you choose - fiction, history, nature, biographies. Make a routine of reading. If the children don’t seem interested in the book, put it down and grab another. There are so many life-long skills developed when children of all ages are read to. They learn to listen, their appetites for good literature develop, there is family togetherness, vocabulary is learned. Discussions with your children about different characters and plots are a rich reward for the entire family.

What do you do?

This entry was posted on 25. March 2008 at 23:10 and is filed under LITERATURE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.