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Experts have a lot of tips on how to encourage your kids to grow up to be big readers. The most obvious is to read to them of course. For my family, that has had a 50-50 success rate. Hayley loves when we read to her and also enjoys “reading” them to herself. Breanna has not been so keen on it. She does like to sit and look through a book or bring it over to me, but she doesn’t want me to read, she just wants me to turn the pages and tell her what things are when she points to them. I know it doesn’t mean she won’t enjoy reading when she’s older, but it does make like challenging when I’m trying to read a bedtime story to Hayley and Breanna’s leaning over to try to turn the pages faster.
One tip that experts mention that not everyone realizes is that a great way to encourage reading is to let your kids see you read too. A lot of us do other things during the day – working, cleaning, cooking, and of course taking care of our kids and their needs. How many of us reserve reading for the evening when we’re curled up on the couch with a novel or tucked into bed before going to sleep? True, that’s the best time to read uninterrupted, but the kids don’t see it because they’re (hopefully) asleep then.
If we can manage to sit down for even five or ten minutes with a book while the kids are up, they see that Mom and Dad like to read too and it sets a good example for them. I know I’ll be setting that example this weekend. For my birthday, my sister pre-ordered a copy of the final Harry Potter book and sometime tomorrow it will be enroute to my home. Two years ago I scared a postal worker by screeching “THANK YOU SO MUCH!” when she delivered book six, so I can only imagine how excited I’ll be to receive the book tomorrow. Once it arrives I plan to cram as much reading in as possible in order to finish it by Sunday night because all of my work is online and I’m so afraid of ruining the ending for myself, so I will be offline all weekend.
My kids are certainly going to see an adult engrossed in a book this weekend.
Do you only read when the kids are sleeping or do you let them see you enjoying a good book?
We have a backdeck water table. My daughter knows that when she plays with the water table, Mommy reads her book. Granted, I usually get wet, I always get sandy, I rarely read more than one page uninterrupted, but she knows that I love to read and make time for it. She’s just turned three and loves to ‘read’ her books, too!
1759 days ago
[...] Quite interesting that over the past week that two parent bloggers were commenting about reading and books, Jesse of DadBloggers and Sherry at Inside Motherhood. [...]