11 Free Ways to Encourage Kids to Love Reading

Reading and writing are timeless pursuits that improve the mind and don’t require any money — just a trip to the library and a little imagination.

But with all the flashy video games and expensive toys out there, how can we get our kids to fall in love with good, old-fashioned words?  Educator, literacy expert, and author Shelley Harwayne is full of ideas, and she shared them at our last PTA meeting.

In her thirty-year career, Harwayne was also a superintendent of New York City public schools, a founding principal, teacher, co-director of Columbia University’s Teachers College Writing Project, and is the author of many books for educators, parents and children including Lifetime Guarantees: Toward Ambitious Literacy Teaching and Writing Through Childhood.

Here are just a few of Shelley’s fun and inexpensive ways to fuel a child’s love of reading and writing.

1. Read aloud to your child.

Easy, huh?  Child development experts agree with Shelley that simply reading to your child is the single most important way to feed your child’s interest in the written word.

Here are some tips to make the experience playful and joyous:

• Create a sense of excitement and wonder around a new book
• Read the first page in the most inviting way you can, “as if you were revealing a secret, making an amazing announcement, or extending an important invitation”
• Point out the name of the author and illustrator, and read their dedications, so children can identify with people who create books
• Use different voices for the various characters
• Make endings sound like endings, choosing the right kind of “pacing, emotion or pizzazz” that feels right to you

2. Expose your children to great stories.

“Be fussy about the stories you read to your children,” say Harwayne.  ”When you take the time to carefully select literature for your kids, you are showing them respect and empathy.”

Great children’s literature can also provide cultural referents for an entire generation. Just think of:

• Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
• Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
• The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss

Others, like classic Hans Christian Andersen tales, supply analogies and symbolism that children will use far into adulthood:

• The Emperor’s New Clothes
• The Princess and the Pea
• The Ugly Duckling

Here are some resources Shelly suggests for selecting high-quality books for children:

• Scholastic’s Teach with Caldecott Medal Winners
• 2009 Notable Children’s Books collected by the American Library Association

3. Let your kids get obsessed.

About horses, beads, bridges, trucks, queens, beetles, whatever.  ”When people get deep into something, real learning and thinking takes place,” says Harwayne.

4. Give your children rich life experiences.

Take them to free festivals and concerts, farms and cities, museums and art galleries.  Go kite-flying, river-walking, bird-watching.  These memories will feed their writing, their reading, and their love of storytelling.

5. Play games with storytelling.

Fortunately, Unfortunately. In this game, one person begins a story and then says “unfortunately…”  Another person continues and then adds “fortunately…” and so on.

Whisper a Word. One child whispers a word in your ear and another child in your other ear.  You make up a story with the words and then let the children guess which words were whispered.

Storytelling Jar. This game also helps you find a place for all those plastic party favors and random doo-dads that your kids are always bringing home.

Fill a jug or box with said small toys and use it as fodder for stories.  Pull a couple of toys out and make up a story incorporating the objects.  Shelley suggests beginning with “Once upon a time…” and then introducing a problem to be solved with “One day…”

6. Celebrate your children’s questions.

Write them down, look them up, start a Question Book.  Shelley believes that, “kids should know that we think they are smart when they ask questions, not just when they answer them.”

Here are some books she recommends to encourage children to ask questions:

• Why Do Kittens Purr? by Marion Dane Bauer
• Do Kangaroos Wear Seatbelts? by Jane Kurtz
• Why Is the Sky Blue? by Sally Grindley

7. Allow children time to play.

“There is no rush to read,” says Harwayne.  Because of the pressure to get children to read younger and younger, kindergarten classrooms have become too serious, Shelley believes, and “some kids are not getting the time they need to play.” If we wait longer, reading will “come more naturally.”  (For more on these ideas, see the Alliance for Childhood‘s report Crisis in the Kindergarten: A New Report on the Disappearance of Play.)

8.  Praise children for working hard.

“Sometimes when children are told over and over again that they are smart, they begin to fear not looking smart and therefore take fewer risks, accept fewer challenges,” Shelley says in an interview with A Year of Reading.

For more on the recent rethinking of praise as it relates to education, see these articles at NPR and New York Magazine about the book NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children.

9. Get silly with language.

“Kids need to laugh every day,” says Shelley, “and their silly sense of humor often differs from ours.”  Notice and make up word plays, puns, jokes, rhymes, smushed-together words (like brunch, spork), double meanings, riddles, songs.

Have fun at mealtimes by asking your child if he’d like some “slaghetti and beetballs” for dinner or creating rhymes like, “It doesn’t tickle, eat a pickle.”

10. Be adventurous in choosing books.

Some of the most memorable and unusual stories are ones that might not jump off the shelves at you.

Shelley showed us an out-of-print, dog-eared copy of The Fence, a Mexican folktale where a rich man takes a poor man to court because his children were “stealing” the smells of baking bread wafting from his windows.  The poor man paid him back with the sound of coins jingling in his pocket.

There is something so deep and poetic about ethnic folktales. Some of our family’s favorites are How the Stars Fell into the Sky, Tiki Tiki Tembo, The Story About Ping, and My Pig Amarillo. What are yours?

11. Start family rituals around reading and writing.

“Children love rituals,” says Shelley, “ways of living that are repeated over and over again.”  The predictability of family life can provide structure and comfort in an often confusing world.

Shelley suggests creating rituals to go with the nightly read-aloud, like “sitting in a favorite chair, turning on a special lamp, reading a set number of books.”  Here are some more ideas:

• Game Night. Play games every Friday after dinner. (Break out the Scrabble Junior, Whoonu, Boggle Jr, Zingo, Pictionary Jr, Guess Who.)
• Family Journal. Start a family diary or free blog where you sit with each of your children once a week and write down what is going on in their lives, what is important to them, what makes them laugh.
• Letter writing. This idea helps you find a home for all your child’s art that you can’t store but you can’t bear to throw away. Write a letter to your child’s grandparents every Sunday and enclose some artwork.

For many more ideas, tips, games, and book lists, see Shelley’s latest book Look Who’s Learning to Read: 50 Fun Ways to Instill a Love of Reading in Young Children.

What about you: do some of these ideas work for you? Do you have more to add? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

Stay tuned to Frugal Mama for an upcoming interview with Every Day I Write the Book blogger, Gayle Weiswasser, about ways to save money on books.

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