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How to Encourage Children to Read
By Elisabeth Greenfield
How to make reading interesting and exciting?
It’s a question which is always in mind of any school teacher, so here are a few tips to help
you resolve the problem a little.
Tip 1: Every school has a library, so it has place where to put the books. There are so many
classics which are very cheap and that can form little libraries. You can bye the whole series
or book by book. For example: Oxford Children’s Classics. Our school has some 14 books. So,
when we bought them all we said that every child who reads the book as the first person
from the whole school will be given a right to write an essay for our class’s paper. The
excitement grew and the book were never spared. Sometimes students only came to the
library to say that another student had already lent him the book.
Tip 2: In my class we keep reading journals and when a pupil finishes one story (not a book)
he fills it in. It’s a good stimulus because at the end of each week we compare who read the
most stories and who wrote better about them. But, we always check that a person isn’t
cheating because every time he/she finishes the story he/she brings a book and I open it on
one page and ask him some question which you cannot answer if you read only annotations.
We’ve got also a reading points system that keeps track of the children’s progress. Here’s an
example of what a person can write in the journal.
*
Date – 12.02.11
Name of the book – Pride and Prejudice
Impressions – It’s a really magnificent book.
What is it about – It’s about one typical British family
Author – Jane Austen
*
*
*
Tip 3: Of course the greatest way to make the child to want to read is to help him/her to
choose the book and to discuss it with him/her. In my classes we always gather and discuss
their favourite stories of the week. Children just love Fridays because of this.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope this will help you resolve some of your problems.
———–
Elisabeth Greenfield is a Middle School Literature Teacher.
