When Kids Love to Read: 4 Tips for Raising Readers

It’s been four weeks since we started back to school, and I feel like we are finally getting the hang of our schedule! And by “we,” I am 100% referring to myself. The kids are just fine, of course, but Mom needs time to figure out what to do when and how much time this will take and what to do with the toddler during that time and who’s going to need extra help with which subject and when does Mom need to break out her emergency stash of chocolate. We survived our first three weeks of Classical Conversations, all our workbook materials have now arrived, and slowly things are falling into place. The Normal-Schoolers have once again returned to their Normal Schools which means we have the playgrounds and parks to ourselves, and this fills our introvert hearts with great joy. During this time we also took a three day trip to the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota which was stunning and amazing and difficult and refreshing and exhausting and challenging – in short, we can’t wait to go back.

I have had the privilege of visiting the Boundary Waters many times and this was actually one of the smoothest trips I’ve ever had, for which I am grateful. The difficulty came in helping my three boys (for whom this was a first) navigate the challenges inherent in a wilderness trip of that sort. It was an invaluable growing experience for them!

One humorous anecdote from the trip came after we returned home and were Facetiming their grandma, who wanted to know about the trip and what they liked about camping – and one of the boys told her that his favorite part was the book Mom read to them in the tent.

I couldn’t believe it. A book? I mean, we were only surrounded by thousands of acres of the most pristine wilderness you’ve ever seen, you caught your first fish, you learned how to paddle a canoe, you stayed up late for campfires and saw the stars, we saw otters and osprey and snapping turtles and painted turtles and fed minnows to a snake… and your favorite part was a book?? I am torn between delight and frustration, but I guess we can say we have successfully raised kids who love to read – and be read to. Also, to be fair, there is indeed something special about reading while camping and I find it delightful too. Perhaps it’s because there’s not much else to do, or because I don’t feel pressure to be doing something more “productive,” or simply because everything is better when you’re out in the fresh air! If you are wondering, the book in question wasn’t anything that I considered particularly special. I was scanning our bookshelves ten minutes before we left on the trip, looking for something small and easy to pack and I ended up grabbing The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk. I think our boys happened to be at just the right age to catch a lot of the humor in Burgess’s writing, so we all enjoyed reading it together and they insisted that I finish reading it once we got home.

I wrote another post about raising readers four years ago (!!) but I wanted to elaborate on it because a) our children are older and b) I am older. We still do all the things that I wrote about four years ago, but now we have three boys who can read on their own, Little Sister is just starting to learn phonics, and Baby Brother is in the throes of the “labeling” stage. Go read that old post to see just how much I love this stage.

If you, like us, want to raise kids who love to read and choose to read and receive great joy from a well-told story, here are four more ways to encourage their natural love of story.

More Ideas for Raising Readers

Don’t Stop Reading Aloud. Don’t you dare! Even if, especially if your child can read on their own – you must keep reading to them. Why? There are many reasons, but a few of the main ones would be to help your child gain fluency, learn vocabulary, understand grammar, and as a way of making connections and building relationships within your family. Even though your child can read independently, they probably can’t read quite as fluidly as you can, nor do they have the wide vocabulary that you do – but by hearing you read (or listening to an audio book), they are naturally absorbing this vocabulary (and grasping the meaning of the words based on their context) and learning excellent language patterns, grammatical structures, and storylines. Many of these things your child could not get on their own because they are beyond their current reading level! We can understand stories that are told to us at a much higher reading level than the one we can comfortably read at.

I experienced this first hand when I watched my very first Shakespeare play at a beautiful outdoor venue many years ago. Much of the Shakespearean English vocabulary was entirely unknown to me, and if I were reading the text on my own I would have struggled to catch the meaning – but by watching the excellent acting and hearing the tone and inflection of their voices I was able to follow the plot without any trouble at all. A few unknown words, heard in the context of a well-told story, don’t trip you up the way they do when they are encountered on a page. Furthermore, grammar and sentence structure are not learned well when we read on our own, because we tend to skip things. We just want to find out what happens, so we often miss some of the punctuation or skip over small connecting words – but when you are listening to a book, you can’t do this, so you are forced to hear every single word. This in turn helps you to be a better writer because you have a better grasp of what good sentence structure sounds like. Finally, family read alouds are an excellent way to build relationships. When we share a book together, we all have a shared story experience that we can enjoy together in the moment and also remember fondly in the future. Plus, it’s so much fun! Granted, the logistics in the moment might not always be “fun” as you attempt to get one child to stop yelling and the other one to sit down and the other one to stop poking his sister with a fork and the other one to put his pants back on – but once the kinks are worked out and the story actually materializes, it becomes one of my favorite parts of our day.

Keep Searching For Good Books. I am continually amazed by the number of excellent books in existence. We keep finding more, both old classics and brand-new gems, and there is no way on God’s green earth that we will ever get to them all before the children graduate from high school, which is fine. I’ll likely be tucking some away in their college backpacks, stashing some to save for their wedding, and even holding on to some to try out on the grandkids someday. The point here is that you don’t need to waste time reading mediocre books that no one loves. If you’re struggling through the book and dreading pulling it out again – you can quit! We had to do that just last week. And then go find a better one, because (trust me) there are plenty. Here are a few of our favorite places for book recommendations:

– Read Aloud Revival: Sarah Mackenzie is very much Catholic and I am very much not, so occasionally some of her recommendations don’t work for us, but in general they are excellent. I visit her website at least once a month looking for new ideas.

– Ambleside Online: this is a strictly Charlotte Mason-style curriculum and their book lists are high-quality literature – which sometimes means they might be more advanced than you think your children could handle at that age, but they are guaranteed to be well-written!

– Sonlight: another literature based curriculum which has some wonderful book lists; we don’t use the curriculum but I often steal ideas from their book lists.

– Beautiful Feet books: yet another literature based curriculum which I will frequently scan through for inspiration.

– The Read Aloud Handbook: this one continues to be updated throughout the years and has extensive lists of excellent read alouds!

– Other Homeschool Moms: go ask your friends what their kids have been reading and loving!

Keep Books In Places that Small People Can Reach. I sometimes think we have too many books (is that even possible?) but I also find great joy in seeing stacks and piles of beautiful, interesting, funny, inspiring books in every room of the house. Except for the bathroom – we don’t have any stacks of books in there because it’s approximately the size of a postage stamp and who would be able to concentrate on reading anyways when 3 million children are calling “Moooooommmmm! Where are youuuuuu?” the entire time you’re in there? Not I. For the rest of the house, however, we rotate some books in and out depending on the season, some favorites are always on the living room bookshelf, and each child has a basket or bookshelf near their bed to keep some of their own books within reach. We visit the library a lot and try to keep a fresh stack of picture books on the coffee table. And yes, many of our books have been damaged as small people learn how they should and shouldn’t treat their books, but in my opinion it’s a small price to pay for a house full of easily accessible books.

Read For Your Own Pleasure. No one loves a hypocrite, and I think one of the best things we can do is to set the example and let our children see us reading just for fun. Because honestly, if mom and dad never do it, why would our children believe us when we tell them that reading is fun and they should do it? Seeing us doing so, and enjoying it, and even telling someone else about what we have been reading is a powerful example and speaks volumes. YES, I AM GIVING YOU PERMISSION TO STOP CLEANING THE HOUSE AND READ A BOOK. Don’t argue with me here.

Your children and mine are entirely human, which means there have been and will be plenty of times where they don’t want to read or don’t want to listen, but consistency does wonders as well as the Watermelon Principle. I’ve heard this idea several different places so I’m not sure where it originated but it goes like this: if you cut up a beautiful, fresh watermelon on a hot summer day and give it to your children for dessert, they will probably love it and devour it. However, if on another hot summer day you give them a choice between that same delicious watermelon and ice cream, what will they choose? Some kids are weird and will pick watermelon, but most will probably want the ice cream.

I think the most fitting application here is that if your child has a choice between screens and reading, they will almost certainly never choose to read; so perhaps, just maybe, we should give them the gift of certain times throughout the day where reading is the only option – and then our children might have a chance to realize how truly delicious it is.

Originally written September 24 2023