How to EFFECTIVELY encourage your child to read?

Effectively, or how?

Reading should never be a punishment. Unfortunately, it still happens that it is. For example, when we take away a child’s tablet for bad behavior and insist that he or she start reading instead. If books are presented as the alternative of leisure that we propose as a result of bad behavior, it is difficult for reading to ever become attractive to a child. It is also important to choose the right requirements for the age and skills of the child.

Where to start?

Motivation and desire to read can be developed from infancy through the practice of reading together with a parent. Specialists emphasize that you should always have books at hand, preferably those with an eye-catching cover, full of vivid colors and pictures. And then show them to your child from the first days of life! Thanks to such familiarization with books from the first months, you can instill in your child the need to learn to read – and it is intrinsic motivation that is responsible for the fact that children learn faster and more effectively!

Here is a sample recipe for introducing reading to children from the first days of life:

1. Providing your child with access to colorful books from the first days of life.
2. Selection of the subject of reading according to the child’s interests.
3. Reading to your child every day for about 20-30 minutes.
4. Showing the child what reading is all about by carefully observing the text, pointing with the finger at the lines of the fragment being read and appropriate voice modulation – which will help the child recognize the emotional meaning of a given story (it is worth referring to the pictures while reading and discussing them together with the child).
5. Discussing the read fragment of the text together – checking whether there were words incomprehensible to the child, whether the child listened carefully and understood the text.
6. Choosing a passage that the child wants to read aloud together with the parent (the pair reading method discussed in more detail below).
7. Each time, praise the child for the progress made and his or her general desire to read.

Reading in Hand

A very nice method to teach a preschool child to read! The child and the parent choose a passage to read aloud together. The parent reads the text aloud and calmly, and the child reads it with it – they read at the same time. When an adult notices that the child is beginning to read fluently, they can gradually lower their voice until the child encounters a problem with reading – then the adult raises the tone of voice again and helps the child. Such training should be used every day for about 10 minutes.

Praise

According to behavioral theory, praising a child is extremely important. In the case of using only punishments, it is difficult to achieve the intended educational effect. Therefore, it is worth praising the child after each, even short, reading. Remembering that praise should be: real, sincere, indisputable, devoid of criticism and irony.

How else can you motivate children to read? A technique called Kids’ Skills can help! For the purposes of this text, we have identified 9 out of 15 steps that can help us make reading an even more attractive goal for a child!

1. Brainstorming. Take a piece of paper and write your child’s name in the middle. Write down or draw together all the skills he can do. Then think about what else they could learn. Try to steer the conversation so that one of the skills mentioned above is reading fluently and independently.
2. Identifying a list of benefits of reading skills. This is a very important step. Encouraging a child to read should not end with compulsion, but rather with internal motivation, which we – adults – are supposed to arouse. It’s not enough to say that reading is important or even fun. It is worth looking with your child for concrete evidence that the ability to read has many benefits for him. For example, it can be noted that reading allows you to go to the cinema to see movies with subtitles, read signs or even a TV program when you want to check what interesting fairy tale or movie will be broadcast.
3. Searching for a name for the activity you are acquiring. We don’t have to call reading reading. Perhaps the child will want to define learning this activity in a different way, e.g. “Becoming a Muggle”. Here, the creativity of the parent and the child is most welcome!
4. Choosing a Magical Creature. The Kids’ Skills method pays special attention to creating effective and long-lasting motivation for the child. Therefore, it is proposed to choose a character from a fairy tale, movie, book or game that the child could identify with and further motivate him to take up the challenge.
5. Creating a support network. The pressure of achievement and quick results, often exerted by the environment on a child, can cause frustration and fear of failure. That is why it is so important to create a support network consisting of the child’s immediate environment instead of a group of people defining and enforcing specific requirements. Here, it’s a good idea to take a piece of paper and write down or draw with your child the people of help that they would like to use while learning their skill. It can be a parent, a sibling, a grandmother, a grandfather, a teacher – it is important for the child to feel that he or she is not alone in the learning process.
6. Building your child’s self-confidence. This is a very important step. Low self-efficacy, fear of failure, low self-esteem or simply a lack of self-confidence often make children unable to challenge themselves, let alone achieve them. There may even be anger or anger in response to an offer to learn new things. It does not always have to result from their reluctance, but for example from a sense of incompetence and powerlessness in the face of new challenges. Therefore, the safest response to a passive learning attitude is to motivate the child in the first place and remind them of all the other skills and successes they have achieved so far.
7. Defining Acquired Reading Skills. It is worth answering together with your child how we will know that our mission has been successful – that is, what needs to happen for us to jointly assess that the ability to read has been acquired. It can be, for example, the number of days of regular reading, the completion of a given book or any other determinant that we discuss and agree on together with the child. Defining the acquired skill is aimed at setting a kind of “finish line” after which we can set further goals, and the ability to read willingly can be considered as acquired.
8. Create reminders. Let’s remember that sometimes there may be doubts about the sense of acquiring a given activity. Or just tiredness, boredom, frustration. In such moments, it is easy for us to forget about the goals we set and the reasons why we wanted to take them. In such a case, it is worth using a pre-established “reminder” signal about the purpose and form of the activity we are learning. It can be a sound signal, a chosen slogan or a gesture – for example, pointing to a piece of paper with a description of the day on which we will celebrate the child’s success.
9. Celebrating success! Agree with your child what the day will look like when you will jointly acknowledge that the skill has been acquired. Ideally, it should be a time spent together, e.g. a cinema, a trip to the zoo, or maybe the first family home cinema with a movie with subtitles?