Guaranteed Tips for Your Your Reluctant Reader

At the start of this summer, I’m again taking a few weeks to focus on one of my greatest loves – reading. In my last two blogposts, I shared about the “Pleasure of a Shared Adventure” and “How to Deeply Connect with a Child.” If you missed these, just click here.

I do know that many of you are concerned about your reluctant reader. You’re afraid they will fall even further behind this summer as they are away from school. So here are some tried and true, experience-proven, successful tips to help your reluctant reader fall in love with books. These suggestions will motivate your reluctant reader and be a delight for you to implement as well.

We had a reluctant reader in our family- our son, Grant. He was just too busy playing ball, climbing trees, shooting off rockets he built, and inventing things, to be bothered with sitting down and reading.

One summer, I started with One Goal – that this child would love to read. I’m a big fan of prayer – so I started specifically praying, “Lord, how do we develop the love of reading in this child?”

One day, after two weeks of diligently praying that prayer, we went to the library. There, standing up on the card catalog cabinet was a book entitled, Taking Books to Heart: How to Develop the Love of Reading in Your Child.” I know Paul Copperman wrote it and Da Capo Press published it, but I was convinced the Lord dropped it there just for us.

Of course, we checked that book out and started in on Mr. Copperman’s suggestions right away. I never could have imagined the delightful summer (and years ahead) of reading that we enjoyed together as a result of following those suggestions.

As Sarah Mackenzie shares in The Read-Aloud Family, it was simply a matter of becoming a “Literary Matchmaker,” fitting the book to the child. We first discovered the Frog and Toad Book Series by Arnold Lobel, then later found “breakthrough books” like Andrew Henry’s Meadow by Doris Burn. Please see Grant’s other favorites listed below.

Key Ways to help the Reluctant Reader:

• Read simply for the joy of reading, not as a requirement or “it’s on the list”
• Start with wordless books – Grant’s favorite – A Boy, a Dog and a Frog by Mercer Mayer but Google Search will give you lots of wordless book recommendations
• Read books together – where you do most of the reading and they fill in the “fun words” – Dr. Seuss books are great for this
• Read aloud with them – we focused on this in the last two weeks’ blogposts on the “Pleasure of a Shared Adventure” and “How to Deeply Connect with a Child.” This way, the child gets to enjoy the story without the effort of reading it themselves; usually a child’s “listening level” will be higher than their reading level
• Read books for fun – joke books, children’s cookbooks, comic books
• Match books with their level of reading
• Match books with their high interest subjects
• Expose them to nonfiction about their high interest subjects – there will be lots of reading levels to choose from
• Pick a few books that would work well for them, and let them choose which one to read
• Get them hooked on a book series – Grant’s favorites: books by Gary Paulsen: Hatchet, Brian’s Winter, The River, Brian’s Hunt, Brian’s Return; and books by Brian Jacques: The Redwall Series and Jean Craighead George’s books – My Side of the Mountain Trilogy
• Use technology – read aloud on an I-pad, listen to an audiobook
• Have the child read books in their home language; they will learn the process and feel more comfortable
• Remember – the goal is to have the child fall in love with reading books, regardless of who is doing the actual reading

If you need specific book recommendations, please check out these anthologies:

Honey for a Child’s Heart by Gladys Hunt

Honey for a Teen’s Heart by Gladys Hunt

Jim Trelease’s Read-Aloud Handbook

The Read-Aloud Family by Sarah Mackenzie

Taking Books to Heart by Paul Copperman

If you would like more ideas to help with this goal of helping your child fall in love with reading, please: CLICK HERE for more Resources.

Next week, we will start a series on using the DISC System for good Communication – partly because it is a reminder I need as I work with many other folks to build our new house and I trust you will benefit from the series as well.

QUESTION:   What kinds of things have you done to help your child or grandchild fall in love with reading?   I’d love to hear your thoughts and observations. Please share in the comment section below.