In lower income homes here in the Philippines, reading to children is virtually nonexistent as books are expensive and difficult to come by, and there are no libraries on our island. When my friend tried to give away her copy of the entire Harry Potter series, she couldn’t find a single relative that wanted them, which is how we came to own that set. Parents here are always asking me how I got Charlie and Olive to love reading so much since they always carry a book with them. So last weekend I gave a talk at our local Sunday farmer’s market about how to raise kids that love to read. I’ve written about this topic before, and the number one thing you can do is to read to your kids from birth. But the audience was largely parents of kids close in age to Charlie and Olive (8 and 10), so I gave the topic some thought as I don’t read too often to my kids anymore.
I laid the foundation by reading to my kids daily from birth until they were proficient readers on their own. But now that they’re older, what do I do now to continue to encourage that love of reading?
I realized that we surround our daily lives with literacy. Reading is a daily habit that we naturally do throughout the entire day.
– Reading is the first thing Charlie and Olive do when they wake up, and the last thing they do before they go to sleep. As soon as they open their eyes, they start reading the book they were reading before bedtime.
– Reading is a family activity. We sit on our sofa and read our own books, but all at the same time together almost every day.
– We play word games daily, whether it’s in the car or at home.
– We don’t make reading a chore or punishment. They are free to read what they want (though I do parent like a librarian).
– We have books in every room of the house and in the car. Whenever the kids leave the house, they almost always take a book with them. If your kid has a book on them, they will read it!
– I model reading. Charlie and Olive love to ask me about the books I’m reading, and see how much I enjoy being a part of my book club.
– We listen to audiobooks and podcasts.
– When there is a movie of the book, the kids get more excited to read the book first then watch the movie.
– We go to the bookstore (which is our library here) every week, and whenever we travel, we always visit bookstores and libraries.
– I’m always researching age appropriate books and books I think they will love. It only takes one book to make a kid fall in love with reading!
– We have a wide variety of reading material beyond traditional books including comic books, magazines, atlases, encyclopedias, cookbooks, etc.
– We always give books as birthday and Christmas presents. Inscribing them each year makes them even more special!
– We let them select their own books. Charlie and Olive have access to Kindle Unlimited and they download whatever they want to read.
– We often talk about the books they read. I can always tell their favorites because they reread them over and over again, and they ask me to buy specific books.
many kids spent the afternoon reading the books we brought!
books we brought from our library
Do your independent readers love reading? How do you encourage that love?
pomelo / 5084 posts
Thank you for this! My son is only four but he doesn’t care about books. No amount of trying is making him interested enough to sit and read
I actually brought it up at his PreK conferences but they said keep trying, and keep books all around him, and someday it will click. I hope so!!
GOLD / eggplant / 11517 posts
We are sort of making up for missed time as well when it comes to reading. My 7 year old has really fallen in love with reading now that she is pretty proficient in it. She didnt like it when she found it challenging. I do a lot of what you do: in incorporate it into the whole day, books in every room, modeling by reading myself, at least weekly trips to the library, sometimes even more frequent than that.
blogger / nectarine / 2043 posts
I am a huge life-long reader so raising one was a big deal to me too. I definitely do all the things you describe in your post and my daughter is coming up on 7 and I think we’re pretty close to calling her a reader officially. The biggest challenge is that she is just very active and doesn’t have the stamina to do much sitting and reading on her own at this point, so she’ll still pick playing over sitting down to read, but she loves reading with us, buying books, going to the library, etc. and I’ve started to carve out new pockets, beyond just bedtime reading, to read with her, like weekend mornings, which are thankfully slow for us. One new thing I’ve been trying is using reading as a tool to calm down if she’s upset about something or needs some quiet time. Instead of forcing her to sit in “time out” or something similar if she’s in trouble, I tell her she needs to spend some time in her room to calm down and she read but not play with her toys. If she’s upset, we’ll cuddle up together and read. I’m hoping as she gets older we’ll be able to do more sitting and reading time together since it’s one of my favorite things to do, but she’s just not quite there from a stamina perspective.
clementine / 948 posts
My family growing up was big on reading. The first time my DH came on a beach vacation w us, he was like, “what you read for hours on end on the beach?!”
I can’t wait to instill this in my kids. We love reading aloud now; it’s hard to set limits on the number of books we read before bed
apricot / 457 posts
Raising kids who love reading is definitely one of my highest priorities. I always made books part of our daily routine – we read at bath time and at bed time and it is something that they have just come to expect. My oldest is 7 and while he loves books, he only has recently started liking to read independently. He doesn’t mind ME reading to him for hours but it was a huge struggle for him to read even a sentence on his own. I found it helped once he started gaining confidence in his reading abilities but we built it up by using graphic novels – Dog Man probably turned it around for us. And that’s been a change for me – while I don’t love Dog Man, I love that my son loves it and I’ve had to stop being such a snob about what I perceive as “quality”. I think my kids can feel how much I enjoy reading and they enjoy that we can do it together.
admin / watermelon / 14210 posts
@lisa1783: dogman is a game changer for so many kids. it’s my go to gift for early readers!
pear / 1565 posts
For my oldest her love of reading exploded in kindergarten once she learned how to read!
blogger / cherry / 138 posts
These are good tips. Snowy is a very reluctant reader. She can’t read on her own yet though she’s starting to.