Stop tearing your hair out over nightly reading homework!

Reading is an incredibly important life skill. One most people will rely on every single day of their lives. And navigating 12 or 13 years of school can be a nightmare for students if their reading skills are limited.

Indeed, what we know about education progression is “Up until the end of third grade, most children are learning to read. Beginning in fourth grade, however, they are reading to learn, using their skills to gain more information in subjects such as math and science, to solve problems, to think critically about what they are learning, and to act upon and share that knowledge in the world around them” (Learning To Read: Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters, 2010, p10). For those who are not reading at a 4th grade level, much of the content they engage with across all subjects at school becomes difficult to understand, creating a significant barrier to learning that can follow them throughout life and have implications for likelihood to graduate and future earnings.

All is not lost though, if you are faced with a reluctant reader. There are plenty of strategies out there to start engaging and energizing anyone and these, in conjunction with a little time and patience, can make big changes.

There are lots of obvious things that come up in various challenges designed to get kids reading. There are suggestions related to WHERE you read:

• Make a blanket fort and read inside by torchlight
• Read while you travel somewhere
• Read lying on your trampoline

There are options for finding new types of books:

• Fead a scary story
• Read a book in a series
• Read a book set in a different country
• Read a book you borrow from a friend

Then there are the massive array of genres to explore (fiction – horror, romance, mystery, comedy, etc OR non-fiction – history, biographies, ) and text types (picture books, novels, series, comics, graphic novels, manuals, brochures, blogs, social media, etc). 

Sometimes, however, the challenge with this is that ultimately, it is all still sitting down to quietly read a text. And often, particularly for reluctant readers, that’s the problem. The where or what of it is less useful to mix up than the HOW. 

Given teachers, particularly in elementary school, often assign “read 4 times a week for 20-30 minutes a day” as regular homework for their students, it is parents who find themselves in the tough spot of trying to enforce expectations and battling a miserable child. Particularly for parents who aren’t avid readers themselves, this can be truly challenging. 

Finding a variety of HOWs to support alongside the homework instruction can be life changing for families. Alternatives that don’t require the sedentary quiet often associated with reading activities. 

There are more options out there than you would likely imagine and filtering through them for some of your weekly reading can really open doors to fun, interactivity and engagement in reading, significantly reducing the home battle familiar to so many parents. 

What exactly am I talking about here? Well, let me give you some examples:

• My daughter really struggled with reading and every suggestion that we participate in this activity ended in battles and frustration. What made the difference – tapping into what she loved. Audrey loves music and wants to be a singer. She loves to sing along to the radio and even makes up some of her own songs every now and then. So we grabbed a karaoke machine, downloaded a few of her favorite songs and got to learning some lyrics. As the words scrolled across the screen we tried to read them and keep up with the artist, and laughed a lot as we failed. For favorite songs, we looked up the lyrics online, printed them out and practiced them without the music so we would do a better job of keeping up. Frankly, Audrey had no idea she was reading and embraced every karaoke opportunity presented to her.

• As a big animal lover, my son loves visiting zoos of any kind. For this reason, we maintain a yearly family membership for the Denver Zoo, just half an hour drive from our home. Thanks to the membership, we can go whenever we like for as long as we want and there are endless reading experiences throughout. Each exhibit has placards describing the animal, where it lives, what it eats and many other interesting facts. While he wasn’t always excited to read them, the desire to know more about each animal almost always won out.

• We had packs of sight word flash cards in our cars, bedrooms and my handbag during the sight word phase of the first couple years of school. They were never anyone’s favorite thing to work with, until we discovered the joy of laying them all out on the floor in front of us and making silly sentences. It helped reinforce not only sight word knowledge but also correct sentence structure. My recommendation for this – have a stash of blank notecards and a marker available when you give this a go. Often verbal language is far advanced of our reading so your child will likely want to include words that a) are not sight words and b) they aren’t sure how to spell. You can work through sounding things out or just write it on a card and add it to complete a sentence or story. I’ll be honest, “fart” was one of the first words we needed to do this for.