Creating a Love and Passion for Reading

10 Great Ways to Cultivate a Love and Passion for Reading! Just 20 minutes of reading with your child can create a lifelong habit of reading in children!

Reading is the cornerstone of learning and getting an education. The world's comprehensive wisdom, advice, and knowledge are locked away in the texts of books.The ability to comprehend, seek, question, and understand that corpus of knowledge takes a demanding reader. Creating a love of learning and a curiosity and passion for learning starts very early. Some of the ideas and strategies I have found as a teacher to create a passion and curiosity for books is just a start to a most important task. We as parents and teachers all have to be very creative and passionate, we must spend dedicated time nurturing a passion for READING, a skill that is neglected today!

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.
-Emilie Buchwald

1. Set aside time daily to read with your child. Make a daily goal of 10-20 minutes. Reading stories your child loves is the biggest way to help your child love reading. If a love of reading is the biggest factor in school success, why aren't we growing this love and passion in our students? 

• Reading just 20 minutes daily has amazing results! 
• That is 3,600 extra minutes of reading each school year! 
• That extra reading exposes students to 1,800,000 million words! 
• Students that ACTIVELY read great literature daily score at the 90th percentile on reading test! 

2.  Create a fun weekly or monthly outing to visit your public library, secondhand book store, or reading cafe and spend time discovering great books. Reading is the most important skill for school success, how can parents make it the top priority at home? 

Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open. Laura Bush

3. Childen need to see that reading is very important to their parents and can be an enjoyable hobby.  Parents need to carry a book with them wherever they go and show children growing their mind and knowledge is a personal priority. Feeding the artist and philosopher inside us is always a great philosophy to teach our children. Why is reading the number one hobby in countries that have the happiest children? 

The greatest gifts you can give your children are the roots of responsibility and the wings of independence. Denis Waitley

4. Turn off the TV and computers one or two nights a week and play board games, read humorous books, joke and riddle books, CYOA books, or read a great book as a family.  Why do Americans binge watch endless TV and make TV time a top priority, yet the idea of binge READING time is wwwhhhaaattt! We really have the wrong order of importance? 

• Number of minutes per week that the average child watches television 1,480
• Hours per year the average child spends in school 900 
• Hours per year the average child watches television 1,200
• Hours per year the average college student reads to get a college degree 200-400

5. Help create and support a discovery learning and library area for your child, a very special place in your home just for their reading, study, research, and understanding. Having a reading nook and or special reading place greatly enhances the chance that your child will want to read as a daily habit. Reading is never a passive activity but own that demands the reader be ready to be inspired and enlightened. Why do we create a special place for watching TV but one for reading? 

The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude. Oprah Winfrey

6. Set SMART reading goals with your children! Top executives (Millionaires & Billionaires) read 50-60 books a year, the average American reads one, maybe two books a year if they're ambitious! CEOs lead some of the busiest lives in the world, yet they take the time to learn and relearn great ideas and wisdom from others. Children need to see that successful thinking and learning is a critical lifelong skill that is enhanced by reading. Why do executives read 5 times the number of books the average person reads? 

7. Listen to imaginative audio books as a family in lieu of watching movies. Audiobooks are a great tool for building imagination and visualization skills in children because they don't interpret the author's imagery for the reader. How are imagination and visualization taught in you home and class? 

“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”― Ken Robinson

8. Questions, dialogue and daily discussions about books and reading. Ask your child to share what they learned, what they found fascinating, and what they found confusing about the books they are reading. What did you read and learn today in school? Share your thoughts about reading, the ideas, concepts, insights, and questions you have about the books you are reading. Share your love of different genres or styles of writing and find out what really sparks your child's literary interest. Reading different genres will help your child develop their love of reading and it'll fuel their daily reading habit. Reading a variety of books creates a fascination and curiosity about the world around them. What is your favorite genre of books and have you shared that with your child? 

Don't Make Assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness, and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life. Don Miguel Ruiz

9. Select books that stretch your imagination and feed your inner philosopher and artist. Books should stretch your capability as a reader and that will help you stretch your wisdom and understanding. Reading daily makes you and your child brilliant and better problem solvers. Reading daily brings out the best in you and your children, they understand they belong and are they are capable of anything they can envision. Reading books broadens your child's horizons and gives them bigger dreams to strive for.  

Don't try to fix the students, fix ourselves first. The good teacher makes the poor student good and the good student superior. When our students fail, we, as teachers, too, have failed.”-- Marva Collins

10. Create an open-ongoing family dialogue around the reasons we read books and how we can learn from great books. Books are great teachers and need to be read to learn the wisdom and lessons that will help us improve our lives. Create a philosophy of discovery and learning that includes reading good books. Talk daily with your child, teach them that chance favors the prepared mind and reading is a wise way to prepare their minds. 

“A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.”― Mortimer J. Adler