For older children, it starts with keeping books available everywhere: in the kitchen, in the living room, in the bathroom is a great reading place, in the car. Just having reading material available, surrounding kids with books as much as possible. Trips, regular trips to bookstores and to libraries are hugely important in terms of exposing kids to the tactile pleasures of books and reading and all the opportunities that they provide. Then looking for these wonderful, creative opportunities to build on reading experiences.
If a child is reading The Little Engine That Could, for example, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory if it’s an older child or Harry Potter, looking for, perhaps, a train exhibit to take them to or train music or train art or going to see the Harry Potter films or exploring other books by Roald Dahl or other books in the same genre or cooking a recipe from a book together or creating a crafts project that might be inspired out of a story or a particular experience in a book.
Those kinds of activities are just wonderful ways to play and keep the spirit of joy alive around the reading experience. It’s also very important, I think, to demonstrate for kids how reading contributes to life skills. Things like reading recipes together, reading manuals as we build things together or models or household products that need to be assembled or whatever it may be, reading ingredients when we’re shopping on the backs of boxes.
Those are all wonderful ways to support reading skills without pressure in a way that is showing a child how important reading is to our lives and that makes them feel involved and included and gives them a good sense of the degree to which reading skills play a role. Taking our kids with us to vote those kinds of little activities send powerful messages to our kids about the value of reading in our lives and the need to have that as a part of our life skill base.
