I know I’ve said this before but Master Frugal was once very behind his classmates in his reading and although I tried not to let it bother me, it did. It really did. More so because reading is so essential to everything in life that it was starting to seriously affect his confidence which in turn affected all other areas of his life – the day he said to me that he thought he was stupid my heart broke.
But things improved rapidly when he was selected for his schools Reading Recovery program which involves one on one tutoring for an hour a day every day for a full term. Whatever was missing just seemed to click and the improvement in all of areas of his school work was amazing. He’s now so much more confident boy in himself now although he still a worrier by nature!
Anyway, back to the point of this post, as I saw him improve literally day by day I started to relax until eventually I got to the point where I am now.
I don’t ever tell my children that they have to sit down and read and I certainly don’t make them read every night as the school recommends I do. I’d much rather they pick up a book when they want to read so it’s a ‘fun’ thing rather than it being something they have to do!
We have lots of books around the house – I buy them from charity shops and from places like The Works and The Book People when they have good deals on. We do go to the library as well but after our main town library was knocked down to make way for a gym, we only have a small branch with limited choice in the kids section so I always make sure we have lots of books at home.
We have homemade book marks that we’ve made together and we have reading charts that we use to record how much reading we’re doing by adding a sticker to it every time they read for half an hour. When they get to the end we all have a family treat like an afternoon out or a treat tea!
To encourage their learning, we also play word games like Scrabble, Boggle Flash and Hangman which obviously encourage reading so they’re learning without even realising it and when we do cooking together, I get them to take control and read the recipe out from the book themselves.
I also find that magazines are great for encouraging reading – as long as they enjoy reading it then it’s all good if you ask me. I’ve even spoken to the school and said that they weren’t enjoying the books they were reading and their teachers said that they can read any book we choose now so at the minute one’s reading a Michael Morpurgo book and the other is reading David Walliams 😉
At the last school parents time we were told that they were both well above average in their reading ages which is great but even better than that, they both love reading.
That’s all I want really, for them to enjoy reading and to be able to get lost in the stories that they read like I used to when I was their age and continue to be able to do even now.
