Helping Your Child Enjoy Reading

Many times students do not enjoy reading because they struggle with their reading homework and skills. This can be unfortunate because students can learn a vast amount of information from fiction and non-fictional texts. Thankfully, there are many techniques you can take as a parent to increase your child's joy for reading.

Drama Activities

Drama should no longer remain in the theater. Acting activities help students to picture what they are reading and help them connect the chapters together into a complete story. There are numerous effective exercises that can be done at home. One favorite is a freeze frame.

During a freeze frame, the student picks a particularly important or interesting section from the text, makes important props, and then they freeze into the position of the various characters (this means that you and the rest of the family will have to play along for this to work). This activity lets them use their imagination, connect to the text, and gets the entire family into the learning process.

Making this a group activity is one of the reasons why this helps to increase your child's enjoyment in reading. Reading is no longer a passive, solitary task. Instead, it has become an active, group activity.

Journal Writing

Writing in a reading journal is another way for children to make the connections that are essential to make reading useful and fun. In a reading journal, children write their observations about what is going on in the text. These can be both literal and figurative.

It is also effective to write what the child is thinking and feeling about the literature, along with their reading process. Are they feeling the emotions the characters are feeling, do they read as an outside observer or do they take on one of the characters personas?

Art Activities

You can adapt almost any art activity to apply it to a specific text. For example, in symbolic story representation (SSR) student read a text and then decide what symbol or object is most important or best relates the themes of the story to someone else.

SSRs can be in any form-a picture, sculpture, collage, even every day objects; all that matters is that they apply to the story. These can be extremely simple, yet powerful projects.

SSR projects are fun to make because it allows a student to use their imagination and create or take ownership to something. Sometimes, however, they are even more fun to share because it allows parents and children to see how each other thinks and read. Sharing the SSRs with each other gives additional insight and encouragement to reading.

Reading Help

Sometimes these drama, writing, and art projects are not enough for children. This is especially true if they are struggling with various fundamental reading skills such as reading for context, reading for patterns, and literary analysis. If this is the case, supplemental reading programs are often the best answer. Online tutoring programs can be personalized through assessment tests that show exactly which skills your child is struggling with.

These programs can help your child enjoy reading because they allow your child to understand the various skills needed to master reading and do so through fun and interactive games and activities. Completing these programs produces measurable results in your child and their abilities.