10 Tips For Raising Active Readers
Does your child really know how to read?
Learning to be an effective, active reader can make the difference for your child between reading books and understanding them, between passively floating across the words and actively taking the words in and thinking about them. By the time your child enters college she will need to know how to actively read. Some colleges even develop assistance courses on the subject on reading effectively. Even if your child is just starting on the journey to becoming a reader, there are lots of things you can do to make their experiences more meaningful.
10 Tips
- When you read aloud to your kids, pause and ask questions. Get them thinking about the words you are reading. Ask things that require them to imagine how they would have felt and reacted in similar situations.
- Have your child re-tell you a story that you read to him, you read together, or he read on his own. Retelling stories reinforces ideas and helps build vocabulary.
- Have fun with making up your own alternate endings or imagined sequels. This helps kids to empathize with characters and expand on the what if moments.
- Teach your kids to pay attention to reading clues. These include titles of books, chapter titles, pictures and illustrations, and overall design of the book. If a chapter is listed as Week 3 (instead of Chapter 3), ask your child what the author might mean by this. These subtle clues help them to discover the context of the work and make inferences.
- Watch movies based on books after you and your child have read them. This way you can compare notes, talk about similarities and differences, and discuss interpretations.
- Teach them about the best ways to care for their books, such as using bookmarks instead of dog-ears and caring for the spine of the book. Caring for books is one tiny step in respecting the efforts of the author, and it gets your kids to pay attention to the tangible item of the book iteslf.
- When you and your older child read non-fiction books, make notations about interesting facts or questions you might have. Keep a notebook on hand for such purposes, and make sure your kids see you actively reading. If you read a book together about sharks, write down the page numbers of the types of sharks you found most interesting, or those that lived closest to you. Reinforcing facts by taking notes is a valuable tool to teach kids that will assist them in their education for years to come.
- Introduce them to the joys of sticky notes! They make great small, colorful notes that are easy on books and easy for kids to use. Encourage them to place them in the books they read whenever they come to a favorite, exciting, or unbelievable part of a story. That way when they want to relive the wonder of it with you they can flip to their sticky note mark and read you an exact quote.
- Encourage your kids to keep a notebook of new words. Have them write down the page number of the word and the actual word that is unfamiliar. Growing up I often heard “look it up” when I was unsure of a definition. I have found with my own kids that having them explain the context of the sentence or paragraph helps them discover the meaning on their own. If all else fails, then grab the dictionary!
- Find a book club through your local library or community education program. Providing kids with environments where they can discuss books with their peers is an excellent way to prepare them for future academic and business endeavors. One of my sons is in an all-boys book club (but they don’t call it that – it’s just not cool enough), where the boys get to read exciting works of fiction, talk about their assigned chapters and what they think will happen next, and then eat lots of great snacks and run around playing in the yard with their friends.
On the surface reading can seem like a quiet, almost mundane activity where we are the observer. When we take the time to teach our kids to be active participants, we help them to develop critical thinking skills, empathy for characters, and higher cognitive processing capabilities. All this can really start before they are even reading on their own – actually – it should start before they are reading on their own. Let their books be their stage and open new worlds for them.
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