I want to launch a blog section where I will share with you books, stories, poems, and other readings that can help us instill values in our children or that can be very useful and inspiring for parents.
The first entry in this section I want to dedicate to transmitting and instilling in our children that PASSION and ENTHUSIASM for reading from a very young age because, as Talentina says...
A couple of months ago, I bought the book "Practical ideas to encourage reading at home" by Fran Nuño.
This is not a book to read to our children but a book to "inspire" us parents.
The truth is that it has given me a lot of ideas to instill a PASSION for reading in my children. The book proposes a lot of games and activities to share with our children around books, as well as a series of micro-stories, poems, and plays to "hook" the little ones.
And it is that encouraging and motivating reading from a young age is something that we parents can do with small daily actions.
Here are some of the ideas I liked the most and plan to do with my little ones:
AT HOME:
- Reading corner: let's create a reading environment at home; we can create a special reading corner with just an armchair, a small table with books, and a lamp!
- Children's library: let them have their own space for their books and make sure these are in a pleasant, fun, dynamic place, and within reach so they can pick them up at any time.
- Reading diary: they could make it themselves with a small binder and index cards on which they include the title, author, publisher, genre, theme, pages, etc., of the books they read. They can also add a rating based on whether they liked it a lot or a little, the start and end dates of reading, who they would recommend it to, other books by the author, a summary, a drawing, etc... You can add as many things as you like!
- Storytime: find the best moment; it doesn't necessarily have to be before bed. Sometimes we parents are so tired at that hour that we want to finish as quickly as possible, and that shows. In story reading, interpretation is important; don't read the story linearly but differentiate the voices of the different characters and dramatize it in a certain way to capture the child's attention more. And I haven't read this in the book, but I do it at home, and I love it! Have them tell us the story, in their own way, with their vocabulary, and you'll be surprised by the result :=).
- Games around the story: here the book proposes several activities we can do to stimulate their love for books, such as using family photos to invent stories, making a drawing based on a read text, inventing stories with randomly chosen words, making a special bookmark, turning the home into a museum dedicated to a chosen book, playing library, etc.
OUTSIDE THE HOME:
- Make them members of the Public Library and visit it frequently. They will have a lot of fun, and it's a very appealing plan for a Saturday morning, for example, when there's more time. There you can spend a good while looking at books, leafing through them, touching them, and deciding which one to borrow to read at home in the coming days. It will fill them with excitement!
- Visit bookstores, book fairs, storytelling events, etc., frequently. INVOLVE them in all activities that, in a fun and entertaining way, can "hook" them on books.
Finally, a tip I would say is "basic": Never force it. The idea is to share our passion, not impose it, because then we will most likely get the opposite result.
I hope this post has inspired you. Can you think of more ideas to encourage our children to read?
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