How do we get our kids to love reading?

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Permalink Reply by Annie Kidder on December 12, 2011 at 6:09pm

I have more questions:

• Does listening to books count as "reading?" (that's what my youngest daughter does).
• Does your school have programs that are just about reading for fun? Do they work?
• The percentage of kids who say they like to read has gone down, but what's to blame - is it the internet? TV? a narrow definition of reading? the focus on testing?

 

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Permalink Reply by Marilyn Book on December 13, 2011 at 4:28pm

I am a library technician and the only one in the high school library for 3 of the 4 periods a day.  I do the majority of the purchasing and with a very very tiny budget I have to be careful to get what the kids will read.  I listen to a lot of audio books in the car (I drive an hour a day to and from the school) and get most of my audio books from Ontario Library Service which is fantastic.  I have turned a few students and teachers into ebook and audio book junkies with that library site.  Not all public libraries are part of it but for us out in the rural areas it is a great addition.  I listen to and read the books the kids are reading so I can talk to them about the characters and what is happening to them.  I actually had a teacher come and hug me because a student that refused to read needed to read one book to pass a remedial course.  I gave him a Garth Nix and he read not only one but two books.  I tell the kids that say they don't like to read that they just have not found the right book yet and then try to find them the right one.

I did not mean to get so long winded but did want to tell you that in our school, one day a week we have a DEAR program, Drop Everything And Read.  For 20 minutes kids and teachers just read, it can be anything from the newspaper to a text book to a novel or non-fiction.  I love when the students come in to get something because they "have to" read and then come in for "something like the last one" because they "want to" read.

We also have the White Pine Book Club, part of Forest of Reading put on by the OLA.  We are a small school but I usually have at least 20 students reading even if only half come to the meetings.  We do teleconferences with the other schools and have a pizza party on voting day.  I even have 3 boys signed up and 1 actually comes to the meetings.

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Permalink Reply by Gay Stephenson on December 13, 2011 at 4:35pm

I think being able to choose what you read and when you read it matters a lot. Yesterday when we released the report, I received this text message from my 23 year old son:

"Just read the article you posted about fewer grade school kids enjoying reading. Got me thinking that I NEVER enjoyed reading at school!! If it weren't for Star Wars, I wonder if I ever would have started reading lots of novels. And I was reading them (Star Wars books)  for the same reason as the girl in the newspaper, who said books took you away to another place, and that the movies are never quite the same as reading the book."

I think he would have said he liked to read on the student survey because he loved books at home... but I'm not certain.

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Permalink Reply by Gay Stephenson on December 13, 2011 at 5:33pm

If you'd like to listen to some of the insights from our press conference - take a peak at this video (4 minutes). Speakers include Patsy Aldana, co-chair National Reading Campaign, Sam Hammond president ETFO, Kelly Gallagher-Mackay research director P4E, and Annie Kidder executive director P4E.

 

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Permalink Reply by Briony on December 15, 2011 at 2:17pm

There must be something about modelling the behaviour of your parents in this discussion. My parents were always reading, talking about their latest good read when we were all at the dinner table. We'd spend time at the book stores and the library not just getting books for me but also for my parents. When I became old enough I read the same books as my mother. The house was full of books, reading became part of our family identity just like camping or playing music together.

How can we expect our kids to love reading if their picture of us parents enjoying ourselves is when we are on the computer or talking about films or TV shows we watch and we never mention books? There is so much competition for our attention these days. I worry about my own ability to concentrate long enough to read a book in a sitting. How can we see this improving for our kids when we have trouble finding time to read ourselves?

Our son is dyslexic and loved being read to. When he was small he had this fabulous fisher price cassette player and for hours would listen to book tapes while he played lego. I think he listened to Bleak House about 3 times through. I certainly would never have read it more than once. Book tapes are amazing. A way to discover an author that might be beyond your reading level, but right up your street.Once his reading caught up however, he started reading like a fiend. He is now addicted to podcasts and says he's learned more from ted.com than from High school. Not sure if that is true but he really does love reading. 

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Permalink Reply by Gay Stephenson on December 20, 2011 at 3:41pm

This is cool! You can even watch him speak in a video on the Ottawa Citizen.

"There's no better way to get away, than to escape into a book" says Sean Wilson, artistic director Ottawa International Writers Festival responding to the report we released last week. Sean wrote letter about children needing literacy skills to secure their future and reads to his 6 year old son.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/literacy/raiseareader/Fostering+love+r...

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Permalink Reply by Sasha Korper on December 20, 2011 at 6:08pm

Ah, the love of reading...it's like the love we have for anything: it's based on our experience of it. By and large, children are visceral beings -- they are most attracted to that which they can touch, feel, interact with directly. As parents, educators, adults in their lives, perhaps we need to support kids in becoming fully engaged with books. This requires repeated exposure that is exciting, mystifying, fascinating and above all, fun! A key skill required for the love of reading is the ability to make a movie of the story in your head, i.e. the capacity to use your imagination. Learning to use one's imagination well, like many skills, requires practice. So, we might consider putting away the worksheets in class, turning off the TV / video games at home, and getting into some good old storytelling. Read a novel, magazine, comic, short story, whatever. Talk about it. Draw or collage about it. Change it: write a new ending. Act it out. Make it into a play / skit / pantomime. Film it. Share it. Dress up and become your favourite character for the whole day...Are we having fun yet?

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Permalink Reply by Gay Stephenson on December 21, 2011 at 9:27am

Sasha, thank you so much for posting this inspiring response. You've explained it so clearly!

I got so depressed the other day when reading one of the letters to the editor whose position seemed to be that it didn’t matter how much drudgery is involved in the acquisition of a skill such as reading - that what matters is the level of proficiency that results. In other words, we can only enjoy things we're good at, pure and simple. To me, there was so much more to it than that - and your post articulates it all. Yippee!

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Ogren on December 30, 2011 at 3:26pm

   I'd like to see parents turn off the TV and put away the computer games...like to see the parents setting a good example and reading themselves...books, magazines, newspapers.

  I love the idea of the DEAR program at that school...drop everything and read...fine idea!

  I like to find things a kid is already interested in...baseball, fishing, lizards, snakes, birds, cars, cowboys, anything, and then come up with books on these for them to read.

  I taught in a youth prison for a dozen years, and most of the boys (ages 15-25) could barely read, if they could read at all. Many had never actually read and finished a single book. I let them read as a reward, and it worked. 

  On-line reading is fine, I guess, but to me it doesn't really "count." At any rate, the key word here is "love." Do they love to read? This is what is being lost more and more, the love of reading. Good school librarians have been the target of budget cuts, but they're important, and often a good one will know exactly what book to recommend to a child. We need more librarians, less TV, and fewer video games...maybe while we're at it, we need parents to exercise the right to say NO to their kids more often.

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Permalink Reply by Sam on January 1, 2012 at 2:13am

What about the possibility that reading is becoming an outdated mode of communication. Certainly you must read this to understand it, but it seems as if this is not what is being undewrstood here as reading. We are meaning reading books, or the news paper and gaining some enjoyment about the use of language - are we not? But Annie asks an interesting question - does listening to books count?

I know kids who access the internet to get information for their school assignments that they have to read, but this is not reading in the sense that we mean here either.

Our ideas of what reading is have to change.

Our ideas of literacy have definitely been redefined.

Is reading a visual or a linguistic intelligence? (Oh, I know that it's both)

but reading isn't books anymore.

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Ogren on January 1, 2012 at 10:16pm

I feel like I need to disagree with Sam....reading IS exactly about reading books.

Yes, internet browsing and so on is perhaps better than no "reading," and sure, listening to books on tape (being actually read by a reader) it's good stuff, and I think it must sort of "count."

  But the aim here (and if we are to aim, why not aim high?) ought to be to turn kids into people who LOVE to read books. And for my money (and of course, I'm old) I'd opt for real books, with paper pages, covers, the real McCoy. The sort of thing you can take with you camping, out in the middle of no where, off the electric gird...and it will still work. Get a kid to love reading these, and you have done her/him, a big favor.

  Call me a snob, but so much of the world seems to be readers, and non-readers. 

And it isn't very difficult to tell the difference.

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Permalink Reply by Sam on January 3, 2012 at 8:00am

Thomas confirms what I suspected. When we, people of a certain generation, speak about reading we are referring to books. The article that Shiela provided a link to  talks about a difference in the kinds of interactions between parents when reading with their children using ereaders and those that they have when reading books. (Parents tend to focus on the mechanics of the machine rather than the content of the text.)

That's not really a problem with the device. That is a problem with the comfort level of the person using the device. I have an ereader and I have tended to read more with it than I have ever read with a book. I like to read several different things at a time and my ereader has them all in it.

I agree with Thomas that hard copy text is of value when somewhere off of the grid even if books can be cumbersome things.

Reading, though, is not about books. Reading is about the flow and rhythm of words. It is about the juxtaposition of sounds. It is about the way the words have a reference to things and how they create images and ideas within our minds. Reading is about the transportation of language.

When Guttenberg first printed the Bible it got him in trouble with the church because he was giving access to texts, previously only accessable to those in power, to the general public and thus the power to judge for themselves what was relevent to them. 

 

Reading is not about books.

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