Parents have told us that the following tactics only strengthen a child's resistance to reading:
- Nagging. Avoid lecturing about the value of reading, and hounding a child who is not reading. Your child will only resent it.
- Bribing. While there's nothing wrong with rewarding your child's reading efforts, you don't want your youngster to expect a prize after finishing every book. Whenever possible, offer another book or magazine (your child's choice) along with words of praise. You can give other meaningful rewards on occasion, but offer them less and less frequently. In time, your child will experience reading as its own reward.
- Judging your child's performance. Separate school performance from reading for pleasure. Helping your child enjoy reading is a worthwhile goal in itself.
- Criticizing your child's choices. Reading almost anything is better than reading nothing. Although you may feel your child is choosing books that are too easy or that treat subjects too lightly, hide your disappointment. Reading at any level is valuable practice, and successful reading helps build confidence as well as reading skills. If your differences are simply a matter of personal taste, respect your child's right to his or her own preferences.
- Setting unrealistic goals. Look for small signs of progress rather than dramatic changes in your child's reading habits. Don't expect a reluctant reader to finish a book overnight. Maybe over the next weekwith your gentle encouragement.
- Making a big deal about reading. Don't turn reading into a campaign. Under pressure, children may read only to please their parents rather than themselves, or they may turn around and refuse to read altogether.
1 comments:
The suggestions offered are great and go a long way towards lessening the tension that reading can generate in children. However, they do not touch on an area that is critical: namely, how to ensure that a child is successful in whatever reading activities he or she faces. The general assumption is that reading instruction takes care of these problems. All a child need do is apply what he or she has been taught. But for many children, that is not what happens. Instead, regardless of how much they try, the printed page leads them to endless "wrong responses"--to repeated situations where they cannot "sound out the word," or "blend the sounds together," or "guess at what the word might be." These difficulties are central to why so many children are "turned off" to literacy. And these difficulties make it essential that we develop methods of instruction that (i) minimize the rate of error and (ii) offer techniques that enable children to get past any errors easily and effectively. For those who are interested in ways this goal can be achieved I invite you to visit my web site, where you can contact me, if you would like - www.phonicsplusfive.com.
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