1. Don’t make them read

Granted, this sounds a little strange, but reluctant readers are often readers who are lacking in confidence. They may be early readers who have never really got off the starting blocks, or they may be slightly older readers who have told themselves – or been told at some stage – that they are not ‘good’ at reading. They soon stop attempting to read because they have already predicted their own failure. There is little more painful – educationally speaking – than sitting next to a child you are meant to be ‘hearing’ read and watching them struggle to sound out every word. If this is the case with your child/student, then stop. Go back and don’t make them read for a while: read to them instead, letting them see the words on the page, allowing them to focus upon the joy of reading a story, which is where a life-long love of books is really born. They need to re-engage before they can begin again to read.

2. Start with bite-size chunks

When my son was in reception class and going through a particularly resistant phase with reading his school books, I had to try to figure out a way to work around it. He had passed the early stage where his books consisted of 5 pages of ‘Tap, tap, tap!’ ‘Pat, pat, pat!’ and had realised that 24 pages of book with a proper story was going to require a little more effort on his part…Instead of insisting that he always read his school book when we were having our reading time at home, I would sometimes write him a couple of silly sentences which he liked to read, such as, ‘The clouds are made of cheese.’ The sillier the better, really! If he had a particular word he had to learn that week I could also incorporate that into a sentence and it seemed like a lot less of a chore than reading a whole book.

3. Let them read anything (well, within reason…)

The list is really endless here, but the point is that everything counts as reading: the back of cereal packets at breakfast time, road signs, house names,  ‘for sale’ signs on your way to school, ‘no parking’ signs. Any type of book counts too: some children find non-fiction far more appealing, so go with what they like and encourage them in any interests that they have. My 6 year old is currently stuck in the middle of a ‘Dr. Who’ phase and his favourite book is a compendium of monsters, which he can often be found poring over, rating each monster on their strength or speed or ‘scariness’ factor. As adults we read for pleasure, but we often forget that children’s reading should be just the same.

4. Let them write and read  

This is another strategy that worked well with us. We put up a large whiteboard in our kitchen and let the children write on it. They could write anything that they wanted to, but they had to read it back to us. Of course they didn’t spell the words correctly initially, but that didn’t matter. We also wrote words on the board and they read them back to us. Then we progressed to sentences and pretty soon they were reading those too. You can also – if you have a magnetic board – buy the first 100 words as magnets and stick them up there for your children to find and play around with. Whatever you do, don’t drill them on the words: just leave them to play and explore and soon they’ll be creating whole sentences and proudly showing them to you.

5. Work out what kinds of reading strategies they use

When I was at school, I’m pretty sure we followed the ‘look and say’ method of learning to read, but today it’s all about phonics. In itself, it’s a mixed method approach anyway – as we all know how ‘un-phonetic’ our spelling system is – and some words (‘tricky words’) just have to be learned by sight the way most of my generation would be familiar with. However, this – like any method – does not work best for all children. Some find it a real struggle to blend individual sounds into words and it can hold back their early reading – and confidence – considerably if this is the sole method that is relied upon. Some children are just more natural ‘sight readers’ – they see the whole word and learn it by remembering it by sight, rather than by blending the sounds together. Watch and see how your child seems to learn best and discuss it with their teacher. Most schools – whilst using phonics as their main method of teaching early reading – are willing to be flexible and every good teacher sees their students as individuals.

 

‘There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.’ Frank Serafini.