5 Motivational Activities That Encourage Children To Read
By providing activities that encourage the child to read, you also promote the development of the child’s intelligence and communication skills. Reading is a great pastime that improves concentration, activates mental processes, expands vocabulary, and improves written and oral expression. In addition to all of this, reading offers many other benefits to a child’s personal life and learning path.
As experts at Oxford University’s Department of Learning focus, reading should be a celebration, not a source of frustration. The key to learning this is that the child is offered reading even before he or she can even read. It is also important to keep in mind that each child learns and processes information in different ways.
Why are some children not motivated to read?
- The child sees reading as an obligation.
- The child has difficulty understanding what he or she is reading.
- The child finds reading boring.
- The child has not yet found books of interest to him.
Activities that encourage the child to read
As your child begins to become familiar with the wonderful world of reading, you may want to introduce the following motivational tools that encourage your child to read and maintain reading motivation.
1. Read with your family
It doesn’t matter if it’s a recipe book, a storybook, a trade list, or traffic signs erected along a highway. The importance and necessity of reading should be emphasized to the child. The best way to motivate a child to read is to set an example for him or her and take the time to read among the family.
2. Provide reading material for the child
When a variety of books and other resources are available, a child may be interested in exploring them. So choose books early on with eye-catching colors and illustrations. Later, you can obtain stories and non-fiction books for your child about topics that interest him or her and suit his or her personality.
3. Leverage technology to the right extent
Teaching children has changed shape thanks to all the technology at hand. While these changes may have some negative consequences, they also have significant benefits when it comes to reading. Tablets and e-books with their many interactive features can motivate a child to read more.
One of the main benefits of these tools is that they are shaped according to the personal needs and wishes of each child. For example, you can choose how many lines of text appear on a page at a time and change the font size to your liking. Technology can be of great help, especially for children with special needs and difficulty reading traditional books.
4. Show interest in the child’s reading
Parental reactions to a child’s reading can have a major impact on the child. It is important that you encourage and give feedback to the child and ask questions about the content of the book to see if the child understands what they are reading.
Let your child choose books that interest him. This makes him consider reading entertainment rather than coercion.
5. Plays
By going to the theater and then reading the scripts for the plays, the child learns that the written works can come to life. You can also put together costumes to fit the play and go through the dialogues to re-play the story at home. The same can be done with song lyrics, poems and comic books.
If you want to improve your child’s cognitive, social, and communicative development, arrange reading activities for him or her on a daily basis. Over time, you will find that your child will do better in school, have better self-discipline, and his or her written and oral expression will improve.
