Reading: A World of Adventure

Why do you read? Why don’t you read? Both of these questions get to the heart of reading and teaching reading.

I read because I love learning new ideas, escaping to other places, times or worlds. I am unusual because I read for the sake of reading. The running joke in our family is that I will read literally anything that is put in front of me including cereal boxes, milk cartons, instructions, etc. The majority of people aren’t like that. Most people need a reason to read something, some incentive to make it worthwhile. For someone with dyslexia, there absolutely must be some built in reward for making the effort required to read, or it just isn’t worth the time and energy spent.

For someone who struggles with reading, there is certainly no immediate reward in learning to read. It is tiring, frustrating, disjointed and seems totally pointless. If you struggle with reading, why on earth would you bother to try? For most students, they do it because they are told they have to do it. They are told that one day it will be easy, they will enjoy reading and be able to learn a lot by reading. Sadly, for many people, dyslexic or not, this is not the case.

In 2019 a study by Pew Research revealed that 27% of Americans had not read a book, or part of a book (including ebooks and audiobooks), in the previous year. [1] Now there are many different factors that play into these results, but the bottom line is that about a quarter of the population does not read regularly. Why? Because they have no incentive to read. They don’t experience any benefit or reward from reading.

Before you can effectively teach a child to read, you need to help them find an internal motivation to want to read.

Some kids naturally have this motivation, and even though it is a struggle they keep slugging to master reading. Other kids need help to find the motivation. This is where you come in. Long before a child is able to read to themselves, you want to introduce them to good stories. By good I mean interesting, entertaining and captivating, depending on where their interests lie.

There are several different ways to do this: reading aloud to them; listening to audio books together (we always listened to stories in the car); listening to re-enactments of the book with different actors as the various characters; listening to adapted versions of the story for more complex language like Shakespeare. I know for some people this last point is sacrilege, however, my kids came to love Shakespeare by first listening to some wonderful adaptations by Jim Weiss. Now they look forward to going to the Stratford Festival every year to see one of their Shakespeare productions. The point of this is to introduce them to the pleasure of getting involved in a good story. One that keeps them asking for, “just one more chapter”.

Experiencing the pleasure of a good story is the foundation for creating a desire to read.

Many times I deliberately left them wanting one more chapter with the encouragement that one day they wouldn’t have to wait for me to read it, they could read it for themselves. Other days we went ahead and read another chapter because the anticipation was too much for all of us, including me. Reading was a pleasure shared by all of us. We sat down together, one child liked to cuddle beside me, another was playing with Lego, another was drawing or making something, each enjoying the story in their own way. Their associations with reading stories were pleasant times, and a few snacks while listening to stories didn’t hurt either.

If your child’s only association with reading is hard work, frustration, and stories that don’t interest them (let’s be honest, the vast majority of books for early readers are generally well below a child’s intellect), then why would they ever want to read voluntarily when they are older and able to read for themselves? You need to help your child develop an interest in stories and reading that is not dependent on their skill in reading. Once they have developed that love of stories, they are much more likely to turn into readers as their skills develop. It becomes a positive cycle: they want to know “what happens next” so they the persevere with the reading; they read more regularly so they get better at reading; reading becomes easier so they read more books; and on it goes.

Look for other posts in this series:

1. Now What?
2. Educate Yourself
3. Take the Pressure Off
4. Reading: A World of Adventure
5. Goals: Essential Roadmap
6. Get the Right Kind of Support
7. Persevere: Good Days and Bad
8. Nothing is Permanent Except Change
9. Encourage! Encourage! Encourage!

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/09/26/who-doesnt-read-books-in-america/

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels