Encouraging Reading

Our guest blogger this week is Flossie Epley. We featured an interview with Flossie last week! Flossie has been with TEAM since 1981. She is founder and director of School Support Services (SSS) at Christian Academy in Japan (CAJ). For thirty years SSS has been offering consultancy, resources, and programs to home schoolers and schools affiliated with CAJ in Japan. Flossie and her husband Russ have two adult children and one grandchild.

Hours of driving loomed ahead. Verbal games, story tapes, and listening to music works well for many families. Our daughter is deaf so those didn’t work for her. Fortunately she caught the reading bug at an early age. When we were traveling in the US, she wrote to Grandma ahead a time to be sure she had a library card ready for the two weeks we would be in town. Reading not only kept her occupied on those long car rides, her vocabulary expanded and she learned far more than I could personally teach her.

We all know the value of reading, but how can we encourage our kids to do it?

Model reading–A person learns to read by doing it. If our children see us taking great pleasure in our own reading, they’re apt to copy us and believe reading is important and pleasurable.

Teach your children to choose books that are just right for them–not too difficult and not too easy. An overly challenging book will discourage your young reader. There is a place for assigning some books as long as kids also choose their own too.

Provide access to a wide variety of reading material–books, magazines, websites, letters, cereal boxes, etc. Reading skills improve the most when reading right at one’s reading level, but it’s not necessary to ALWAYS read at one’s instructional level.

Read every day–Carve out a special time and place to read so that it becomes a habit. Some parents up bedtime by thirty minutes and then tell their kids they may stay up for thirty minutes if they want to read. Most kids are willing to read to stay up a little later. If they choose not to read, the extra sleep will do them good.

Associate reading with pleasure by pairing it up with another comforting activity such as curling up in Dad’s lap, a hot drink in the winter, or a cool drink of water with a slice of lemon in the summer.

Read to your children–Books have been written about the benefit of reading to your children so I won’t elaborate here. Sometimes we just need to be reminded to actually do it. If your child only wants to be read to and doesn’t want to read alone, you could take turns reading pages aloud to wean them into independent reading.

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