10 Rules to Make Him Love Reading

A child who likes reading can count on the extraordinary opportunity to learn, while having fun, to write, and speak their language well, to the benefit of future school performance. How to make him love reading?

The 10 rules

Here is the advice

1. Keep many books at home, also placing them on the coffee table in the living room and on the bedside tables, to make the child feel that they are part of the house and life.
2. Putting a dictionary in plain sight and consulting it from time to time in front of the child: serves to make it clear that in books there are solutions.
3. Often say phrases like: “Now I really  read”, ” I’m reading a book that makes me laugh so much “, ” Tonight I couldn’t turn off the light, because I was too curious to know how my book was going to end “. It is useful to make the child understand that reading belongs to the category of fun activities. Which is a pleasure and not a duty.
4. Take the child at least once a month for a tour in a library well stocked with children’s books, then leave him free to browse the books to choose only one, a maximum of two (but for the second it is better to insist on it). Thus they are taught to appreciate books, to understand that they are valuable objects.
5. Do not cover him with books that he does not ask for and that he does not choose and, above all, do not make him feel that you are anxious for him to consider them, as this would have the opposite effect compared to what was hoped for. The message that must pass is: “I grant you the privilege of having books” and not: “if you pick up a book you are doing me a big favor”.
6. Read to him every day for at least 25 minutes a story, a fairy tale, a chapter of a children’s novel, funny, compelling, intriguing to make him understand how rewarding it is to discover word after word, line after line, what is hidden in a book.
7. When reading for him invest the right emphasis, using the voice and facial expressions. In this way the story becomes more alive and more compelling, arousing in the child both the curiosity to know what happens next and the desire that every day the appointment with reading is renewed.
8. Accustom the child to catalog books, dividing them according to a criterion that he can appreciate: for example, animal books; adventure books; storybooks, and so on.
9. Give him some fun bookmarks and then explain to him what it is for and exactly how to use them. Teaching him that “ringing his ears” to a book is a very bad habit while underlining with a highlighter the passages that amuse or interest the most is legitimate, as it makes it easy to find them again: this helps to make him keep attention on the content of what he finds. you are reading.
10.  Teach him to make the “personal book”. It takes a notebook, some of his photographs, various newspaper clippings (which the child himself must provide to obtain from illustrated magazines), a little creativity. The book must be built over time, pasting photos and images and inserting small texts that gradually form the story, of which he can be the protagonist. Until the child can write, mum or dad will take care of it.