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9 Ways to Encourage your Child to Read Over the Holiday Break
- Dec 15, 2016
- 2 min read
Encouraging your child to read while competing with Santa, gifts, cookies, and parties seem like an impossible feat. But I can guarantee you that it is not. Here are some steps you can take to get them to read while they are off from school this holiday season.
Gift them with a Kindle and some books they might love to read already loaded on it.
Take them to the library. A trip to the library is a great way to get out their energy when they can’t play outside.
Find out what books they would like to get for Christmas and tell family members. (Did you know that the new Diary of Wimpy Kid book came out?)
Read with your child before he or she goes to bed. You can pick a book together, and each rotates on reading paragraphs or pages.
Get a book from audible and listen to it on your ride in the car. (Are you driving to relatives houses? Perhaps you are driving a long distance as I am, listening to a book from Audible makes the ride go faster.)
Create a contest amongst family members. Who can read the most pages?
5 Gifts before Christmas. Each day leading up to Christmas you can give your child a new book.
Host a book exchange with neighbors. Invite the neighbors to your house and each of you brings 10 books that you no longer need. This way each person that comes can choose 5 -10 books. All leftover books can be donated to Goodwill, your local library, or a local school.
Get a subscription to www.getepic.com. A subscription is only $5 a month, and you get access to thousands of books including audiobooks that you can listen to on those long car drives.
I liked the suggestion about letting children choose what they read during the holiday break, since it shifts the focus from obligation to genuine interest. It’s interesting how something as simple as choice can make reading feel more like a habit than a task. I found myself wondering how often parents notice a long-term difference when they take that more relaxed approach. It also made me think about how building comfort with reading early on connects to bigger challenges later, whether in schoolwork or more complex tasks, where some people might even look for research proposal writing assistance when trying to organise and express their ideas clearly.