Reading Tips & Ways to Motivate Your Child to Read

Here are some great articles about reading with your children:

from The New York Times "How to Raise a Reader"

from The Washington Post "Why It’s Important to Read Aloud with Your Kids..."

from The New York Times "Reading Aloud to Young Children Has Benefits for Behavior and Attention"

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Tips to Help You Motivate a Reluctant Reader

Make time for reading. If you and your children have jam-packed schedules and reading is shoved between gymnastics and band practice, reading may seem like an unwelcome chore. Allow reading to be a relaxing and enjoyable time.
Set aside a regular read-aloud time with your children. Reading aloud helps your child develop an interest in reading. Choose a variety of high quality literature that appeals to your child’s age and interests. Don’t abandon read-aloud time when your children get older—even teenagers love being read to. Don’t forget about audio books, either; they can offer another great option for a reluctant reader.
Create a cozy reading nook for your child. A special reading space may be all the encouragement your child needs to settle down and spend time with a good book!

Motivate kids to read with reading nooks

Make sure the reading material isn’t beyond your child’s reading abilities. The interest may be there, but if the book is hard to read, your child’s motivation will wane.
Look for a variety of reading material. Children often gravitate toward the fiction shelves in the library, but don’t stop there. There are many other genres to consider. Picture books—even for older kids—can be sentimental favorites. Joke books, cookbooks, how-to books, graphic novels, and biographies are all great non-fiction possibilities. And children’s magazines can be a great out-of-the-box way to encourage a child to read.
Have your reluctant reader read easy picture books to younger siblings. This provides excellent practice yet it doesn’t feel like work.

Try buddy reading with your struggling reader. Buddy reading can help improve a child’s fluency by making him feel more comfortable with reading on his own.
Let humor work its magic! Select a funny book at your child’s reading level and read the first chapter aloud. Then stop reading. If your child wants to find out what happens next, he’ll have to read it himself!
Exhibit a love of reading. When your kids observe that you love to read, they will likely develop a love of reading themselves.
Provide access to books. Use your public library. Create a home library. Keep books accessible. When your child decides he wants to read, you want to be sure there’s a book at his fingertips!

From: https://blog.allaboutlearningpress.com/motivating-kids-to-read/

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Simple Practices to Nurture the Motivation to Read

By: Linda Gambrell, Barbara Marinak

Honoring books for self-selection, sharing the excitement of read-alouds, building a balanced book collection, making your passions public, and providing rewards that demonstrate the value of reading are just a few simple but transformative suggestions that can nurture the love of reading in your classroom.

Research confirms that student motivation is a key factor in successful reading. In Nurturing the Motivation to Read, we examined the current research on reading motivation and engagement. A number of practical ideas for creating literacy-rich and motivating classrooms can be drawn from the findings. These simple but transformative suggestions include "honoring" books for self-selection, sharing the excitement of read-aloud, building a balanced book collection, making your passions public, and providing rewards that demonstrate the value of reading.

Self-selection: "Honoring" books!

Research has shown that whenever teachers do anything to make a book special — even something as simple as placing a book upright on a table — children are more likely to choose that book than any others. We suggest planning this type of self-selection by regularly "honoring" books. Here are some ideas that work:

Highlight individual books as special just by choosing them for displays or to be included in book baskets.
Provide a quick introduction to the books being "honored." Show children a book and then introduce — and endorse— it by reading a few pages or asking students questions to pique their interest. When you introduce books by instilling in children a desire to find out what's in them, those books fly off the shelves. They can become so popular that you night need a waiting list!

Read aloud: Share the excitement!

A teacher read-aloud is the oral sharing of a book for the purpose of modeling strategic reading behaviors and generating instructional conversation. Theories of child development suggest that the socialization of a read-aloud allows teachers and students to collaboratively construct meaning from text. Share the excitement of read-alouds by:

Reading aloud a wide variety of text. Include informational books, newspapers, and magazines in your read-alouds.
Encouraging interaction during the teacher read aloud by inviting discussion. This "give and take" conversation around a shared text engages children in predicting, inferring, and thinking and reasoning.
Inviting students to choose the teacher read-aloud title from time to time. Student choice can be managed by offering several possible read-aloud titles and allowing students to vote on the book they would most like to hear the teacher read.
Allowing students to read-aloud. Read-aloud is often used synonymously with teacher read-aloud. And though teachers should read-aloud daily, inviting students to occasionally read-aloud a self-selected text or portion of a text (e.g., book or magazine article) can be motivating for all. Allowing students to participate in the read-aloud will require some planning. Students should rehearse their read-aloud for several days at home or with a classroom buddy before reading aloud to the class.

Book collection: Balance it!

There is now wide agreement, among reading educators and researchers about the importance of exposing young children a balanced book collection. The International Reading Association (IRA) has taken the position that young readers should be exposed to a variety of genres, including picture storybooks, fiction and nonfiction material, magazines, and poetry (IRA, 1999). A few ideas for balancing collections include:

Be sure to include a wide variety of informational books for reading instruction and in classroom libraries.
Honor all print for instruction and self-selection. This should include reading and learning from fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, and electronic sources.
Celebrate student authors by "publishing" their work in the classroom library and/or news corner. The work of student authors should be as diverse as the class and might include fiction stories, wordless picture books, student created puzzle books, poems, informational books, comic books, how-to books, recipe collections, photo documentaries (student pictures paired with narration captions), post card collections, journals, and news stories (short article about important school or classroom events).
Involve students in the selection of books for the classroom and/or school library. Review and discuss possible titles, invite discussion and debate, and vote for the new books that will be added to the library.

Make your passions public

Reading passions should be made public. Young children want to read and are curious about books with which they are somewhat familiar. Familiarity breeds reading motivation. When children talk about books they most enjoyed reading, they frequently mentioned that they got interested in a book because they had heard about it from a friend, read other books about the character, knew the author, or had read other books in the series. To make reading passions public, consider:

Arranging and maintaining a "Wall of Fame." This bulletin board can be an ever-changing display of reading passions including student favorites (e.g., books, magazines, series.), teacher favorites, family favorites, and the principal's choices.
Publish your Top 10. Everyone stays up late to enjoy Letterman's Top 10. Vote periodically and publish your classrooms Top 10 reading passions. The Top 10 can be a year-long activity by including the top 10 favorite fiction books, information titles, poems, magazines, and websites.
Plan for small group discussion as a part of your self-selected reading time. As Gambrell (1996) notes, students need to share their enthusiasm about books with each other. Self-selection can be more motivating if students know they will have the opportunity to talk with friends about their choices.

Incentives: Demonstrate the value of reading

If your reading program uses incentives, consider using rewards that are proximal to reading. The importance of reading-related rewards may go beyond recognizing the relationship between reward proximity and the desired behavior. It could be that the real value of reading-related rewards is that both the desired behavior (reading) and the reward (books, self-selection, time) define a classroom culture that supports and nurtures the intrinsic motivation to read. Rewards that demonstrate the value of reading include:

books
increased read-aloud time
increased time for self-selected reading
increased library time
time to talk about books
book clubs

From http://www.readingrockets.org/article/simple-practices-nurture-motivation-read

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10 Reading Tips for Families of Young Children

Read aloud to your child every day
●   Read to babies even before they can talk
●   Let your child see and touch the book
●   Play with voices and the sounds of words
Create a print rich-home environment
●   Have a wide variety of books available to children
●   Encourage children to look at books on their own
●   Set aside a family reading area and a family reading time
Use grocery shopping to encourage reading and writing
●   Have children help you search for specific brands
●   Use the aisle markers with your child to find items
●   Match coupons to products
●   Have children write out grocery lists
Cook with your child to develop literacy
●   Show your child how to read a recipe
●   Read the labels on ingredients together
●   Make a family cookbook of favorite recipes
●   Develop oral literacy by talking about family recipes and cooking tips
Point out environmental print to children.
●   Note signage during nature walks and other outings
●   Discuss logos
●   Ask children to point out print outside of the home environment
Tell stories together
●   Talk together about your family history
●   Look at old vacation photos and discuss your memories of the trip
●   Record your storytelling
Sing and rhyme with your child
●   Choose songs with rhymes and word play
●   Play rhyming games with your child such as what other words sound like ”honey”?
●   Challenge your child to sing or say rhymes as fast as they can and don’t forget to laugh if the results are silly
Write with your child
●   Provide lots of writing materials (chalk, markers, crayons, and pencils)
●   Encourage your child to draw and write on their own
●   Encourage your child to write thank you notes to grandparents, make to-do lists, etc.
Tie literacy to art
●   Visit an art museum together and use storytelling to explain what is happening in the artwork. Allow your child to interpret the artwork however he/she views it
●   Have children create their own drawings, painting, sculptures, and even instillation pieces made from recyclables in your living room
●   Explain art with sentence strips on which children dictate to you what their artwork is about (consider making a recording in which the children can tell a story about their artwork)
Visit the library (and/or bookstore) often
●   Make trips as often as you can
●   Encourage your child to get his or her own library card
●   Take advantage of library programs, such as read alouds and family book clubs

Source: Reading Is Fundamental