photo credit: photojenni
How do you instill the love of reading in your children? There is a saying that literacy starts at home. I tend to agree with that statement but I bet a lot of other parents may beg to differ. More often than not, the teacher at school has to shoulder this responsibility.
I love reading although the reading material is sometimes limited to the current news, romance novels and finance materials. Parents who love to read does not automatically mean their children love to read as well. In my household, the kids prefer to watch TV or play games on the computer rather than hold a book to read.
My way of encouraging them
As parents, it is obvious that we cannot force our children to do something that they do not want to do. Besides already being a good role-model (read in front of them), I would take them to the bookstores and also the public library quite often. When faced with so many choices in diverse topics, they are bound to select some materials to read. Luckily for us that we live quite near the library, about 3 minutes drive away.
Another thing I would do is to have reading material or books displayed in the house for them to pick up anytime and read. I discovered that my eldest son has a preference for books on airplanes, warplanes to be specific. When he watches the ‘The History Channel’ documentary ‘Dogfights’, which is a military aviation themed TV series, he was able to identify the warplanes with reference to his books.
My second son loves ‘Garfield Comics’ and we try to source more material from the library. Both of them are also crazy about their favorite cartoon characters, for example ‘Ben 10’. Naturally, quite a number of their reading materials are related to this character. More often than not, we do purchase some books for them just to encourage them to read more.
Of course the one method that never fails to work is reading to your children, especially bedtime stories. This is a habit worth practicing where you teach your children to read besides bonding with them at the same time.
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If not mistaken, I read something about the correlation between having a lot of books at home and children’s reading habit, in the book Freakonomics. The parents who has a mini library at home will more likely to instill good reading habits on their children.
KC,
I am not so sure of this theory. We have a mini library at home but TV and the Internet win hands down anyday.
Present day kids prefer reading from a screen. Perhaps it is a trend and we just have to live with it.
I suppose reading from a screen is still better than no reading at all. Personally, I won’t mind so much as long as it is not playing too much games on the computer.
Fathersez,
Seems like the force (internet and TV) is not easy to be stopped.
I think you mentioned before that you canceled Astro some times ago. Does it help?
My son (7) also loves the History Channel “Dogfights” series. Since his passion is airplanes we have lots of related books too. Currently he is reading a book called World War II for Kids: A History with 21 Activities. There is also a fun pop-up aircraft book by Robert Crowther titled Flight. We’ve also made a Wright Brothers lapbook. Find their passion and go with it!
Hi Dana, I agree with what you’ve said. However, sometimes I do wish my kids can have as much passion and interest in their school subjects as well.
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