Raising readers: motivate your little one to read!

Reading as a habit, when instilled at a young age, can set up your children for a lifetime of learning and knowledge gathering. Foundation years—the first five years of your child is a great starting point.

How does reading affect your child’s development?

While bedtime reading along with your child is fun and cozy, independent reading is a crucial skill required to do well in school. As children grow, books become a window through which they see the world and understand their surroundings. Books also become mirrors for young children to identify themselves through different characters. Reading even opens the door for children to communicate better.

Here are a few significant aspects of how reading affects your child’s development.

Reading develops language skills

Reading aloud to your children from infancy, even if they don’t understand everything you’re saying, gives you the opportunity to introduce them to new words, which helps when they start reading on their own. Most words a child learns in their early childhood come from what they hear in their everyday life. Introducing them to reading will help them learn how language in books is often different from the language they are used to hearing. Whether the book is aimed at children or a well-known classic, they are different in terms of how they’re more descriptive and use structured grammar and style.

Regularly reading to children enhances their phonemic awareness, which is recognizing and playing with individual sounds in spoken words. For example—learning and understanding how the sound of p differs slightly in ‘tap,’ ‘pat,’ and ‘spat.’ Understanding phonics—connecting sounds with their spellings—is the next step. Regular reading also improves fluency and comprehension skills, and more exposure leads to better spelling and writing.

Reading develops cognitive skills

Remember reading a book as a child and how it transported you to a new place, imagining the whole story as if you’re present there, tagging along with the other characters in that universe? Reading books to children helps develop their imagination and creativity in that exact same way. Your child will be able to picture characters, visualize settings and environment, and start trying to guess what’s going to happen next. Reading also helps develop empathy in children as they read about different characters and their emotions and be able to relate to them.

Reading bolsters logical thinking and problem-solving abilities. As children begin to read consistently, they pick up information from various sources, process, interpret, and evaluate it in their own way.

Reading develops vocabulary

Hearing new words spoken aloud or even reading new words exposes children to a range of new vocabulary, expressions, and phrases that they may not have heard otherwise. This way, your child will be curious about these new words and their meanings and later put them to use, correctly, or often incorrectly, but it’s all in a day’s learning!

Reading increases concentration

Regular and consistent reading helps children improve their memory and attention span. It also aids in developing patience which in turn helps them sit still and listen for a period of time, beneficial for when they start going to school. These skills will help your child do better in class and help them learn to be present, give others their full attention, and be involved in meaningful conversations. While children can develop these literacy skills and language development in elementary school and beyond, it’s always a good idea to have a jumpstart by exposing them to reading during infancy and early toddler years.
 

How can parents motivate their children to read?

Read to your child

It’s never too early to start reading to your child. You can start reading to them from their infancy. Start a bedtime routine where you read to your child every day. Even young babies respond to the warmth of your lap and the soothing sound of a book being read to them.  As they grow, you can read newspapers together, and pick a column they want to read. While going out, read billboards, bus schedules, maps, names of the stores, and the print on various packages of cereal boxes to them. Even when your child becomes an independent reader, take a few minutes out of your day to read with them, this will help your child build their language skills. It even has the added benefit of becoming an everyday routine through which you develop a strong familial bond with your child.

Model reading

A great way to influence your child to read is through model reading. Children tend to copy what their grownups do, and what better way to encourage them to read than for your child to see you reading for pleasure—make sure your child gets to see you read and hear you talk about it.

Make books accessible

You can either get new books from a bookstore or a yard sale, loan some preloved books or even visit a nearby library with your child. The point is the more books your child has access to, the more curiosity and passion they will develop for reading.

Let your child choose books

You don’t only have to get books recommended for your child’s age, meaning you can get books written on things they love. If your child loves cars, get a catalog or a magazine about cars and read it to them. Develop their curiosity to learn more by exposing them to topics they love and expanding their horizons so that reading or learning doesn’t become a chore. Encourage reading even when they want to pick out the same books to re-read. Re-reading books provides an opportunity to understand the book differently and better from the first time.
 

Have fun 

Having fun while reading is an important part of encouraging your child to read. Your idea of having fun might differ from your child’s, so appreciate and listen to your child’s curiosity about learning new things. You can try different approaches to motivate your child, like acting out stories after reading them, taking turns while reading, or even reading a story outdoors can make it memorable and livelier for your child.

Head on over to byjuslearning.com to learn more about our Active Learning approach to Math, Language, and Reading for children between Pre-K and Grade 3.