Tips to Increase Your Young Child’s Love for Reading

These are just some ideas I used with my own children as they grew up to encourage them to read. They seemed to have worked quite well so I thought I’ll share some of them on my blog.

1) I began reading to my children from a very young age as soon as they began to speak, which was around 9 months for both of my children.
2) I used books which had pictures inserted to replace the words at various points in the text.
3) I would usually lie down in a comfortable spot where it was easy for all of us to see the words and pictures as I read.
4) I chose interesting books and used a lot of voice dynamics as I read to them.
5) While reading, I would stop by the pictures for my children to name the picture as it came up in the text. They were therefore part of the whole process. If they did not remember/know it, I would tell them and at other times I gave them hints to help them remember.
6) I made the entire process fun and exciting. It was never viewed as work, but fun.
7) We would reread the same book on different occasions.
8) I stuck up beautiful alphabet charts and other stuff around my home so that my children would learn them and I taught them the letter sounds.
9) I used magnetic letters and made up fun games where they spelt words for prizes.
10) As their vocabulary and word recognition ability increased, I bought simple books for them to read. Sometimes I read them; we read them together, or they would read to me, but we did it as fun.
11) As they became more and more independent readers, I promised them that every time they were finished reading a book I would buy another for them.
12) This increased their drive to read so much that I joined them in a library because they were finishing the book really fast and it was becoming a bit too costly.
13) Today, they still love to read and are very prolific writers as well.

Hope these tips can work for you too!