7 Ways to Make Your Child Take Up Reading

Children have this habit of picking up everything they come across every day. Imitating elders is one of their favourite activities. This is the reason why adults should be careful about their behaviour in front of children. You, as an adult should try to teach good habits to your little ones. One of the best habits can be reading.

Reading helps a person to develop newer perspectives about life. Encouraging children to take up reading can help them to get into this habit. The more they read, the more they will love books and in the future, this is going to shape their character in a positive way. Here are a few ways by which you can activate good reading habits within children.

1.       Start with oral tales

It is always best to begin with oral tales that are very common in your culture. It can be a part of the regular bedtime stories or the customary dinner time tales. You can say tales from Aesop’s fables, stories of princess and the monster, the knight and the squire and so on. However, since childhood, your kid should try to understand that neither women are just damsels in distress nor are men always meant to be the charming prince. You can twist the tales in your own way so as to inculcate non-stereotypical ideas in your kiddos.

2.       Start gifting picture books

When your child is still small, buy gifts for him/her. Get hold of colourful, picture books and wrap them in a beautiful gift paper. When you hand over the gift to your child, she will be totally delighted to get such a present. As she opens and discovers the book, she will start dealing with it. Not because she knows that it’s a book and reading is a good habit. But because, she will soon begin to associate the surprise gift with books and will soon take a liking to it.

3.       Library membership

As your child starts going to school and grows a bit older, encourage him/her to take a membership of the school library. Ask her to issue books. You can suggest names of a few good books. You can also take her to the local library and help her select books of her age group. Continue to buy books for her. You should show enough interest in listening to her tales that she has perhaps managed to gather from the books. This is likely to heighten her interest in reading books.

4.       Competitions

Judging from her habits, try to figure out if she is equally interested in writing as well. You can suggest her name to different types of competitions like creative writing or story-telling and so on. However make sure that you do not impose anything on your child. Only if she’s interested in taking part, allow her. Such interactions with other children who are equally interested in reading and writing will motivate your child.

5.       Adaptations

Another way to develop reading habits in your kid is to make her watch films which are adaptations of novels and the like. Watching a film is usually more interesting because the effect is much more spontaneous than that of reading a book. When your child likes the movie, she will surely try to read more on that and thus, perhaps will start reading the original text.

6.       Ask her to read out

During evening hours or a lazy afternoon, you can ask your child to read you a few pages from any of your favourite books. This will serve two purposes, she will grow her interests for reading and you too will get to listen to your favourite novel.

7.       Other activities

Other activities closely associated with reading and writing can be preparing a scrap book or a book full of photographs. Click some nice photos and ask your child to paste them on the scrapbook. Write down beautiful words on top of it. Such creative things will further enrich her mind. The best people to contact for photography are the photo booth group. They can assist you in various forms of photography.

A child is the future of tomorrow’s world. It is better that her future is shaped in the light of positivity before she can help others in shaping their future.