How to Develop Reading Habit in Your Children

How to Develop Reading Habit in Your Children

Karthika Gopalakrishnan

Karthika Gopalakrishnan is Project Manager at the Book Lovers’ Program for Schools. She has worked previously as a journalist and a sub-editor with The Times Of India and The New Indian Express, Chennai. She loves books and runs a free beach-side library on Sundays.

I teach at DAV Public School, Velachery three days a week as a part of my work with the Book Lovers' Program for Schools (BLPS). Ours is a company that gets children from classes I to VIII to love to read. Each school that works with BLPS devotes a class once a week to storytelling, discussions about books, and activities revolving around books.

Achyuth, one of my students from class VIII, is among the best readers at the school. I spoke to his mother about his reading habit. She told me that ever since he was a child, Achyuth and his mother would get on a bus and travel to a library whenever he had a holiday. "Now, if I give him a book, he finishes reading it in a day. His father downloads ebooks for him and tells him to read slowly so that his father has some time to find and download another book for him."

There are a lot of ways that you can get your child to read. One of the first things to do is to give your child access to lots of books. These could be of any genre: animal stories, adventure, mystery, folk tales, fairy tales and so on. It's important to expose your child to a range of books at his or her reading level. By reading level, I mean just that a child should be able to read a book independently and understand the content correctly. Allow your child to tell you which of the books he or she is comfortable reading. Once children tell you about their choices a few times, you will be able to figure out what types of books to pick for them. A best case scenario is for children themselves to select the books that they want to read.

Discussing a book that your child has read provides an added boost. Your child will finish reading the book knowing that there will be an audience that is interested in his or her opinions. Often, the thought process that a book can trigger in a child's mind can surprise you.

This next step may be hard but you should try your absolute best to go through with it as a parent: don't impose your tastes in books on your child. You may think that Geronimo Stilton is nowhere near as interesting as Georgina Kirrin (or George from The Famous Five series of books by Enid Blyton) but if your child prefers Geronimo, do let your child be. It's great that he or she is reading a book. Time will spur them to discover other, possibly better, books and authors.

Make reading a family activity. Allow your child to see the people around him or her reading. You could be reading newspapers, magazines, non-fiction, biographies, or any other sort of book, if not fiction. Give books a visible presence in your house. Make them a part of your child's life. Birthday gifts, return gifts, visits to book stores, trips to the library during the summer holidays are wonderful ways to instil and build a love for books in your child that lasts for life.

Source | http://idiva.com