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March 2, 2015SHARE 
Family Activities to Encourage Good Reading Habits
On March 2nd we celebrate National Reading Day, which also coincides with Dr. Seuss’ birthday. Does your child have a love of reading? Several studies show that if a parent is actively involved in a child’s reading progress, the child has a greater opportunity to succeed.
In addition to simply reading aloud together, there are a myriad of activities that you can do with your child to help encourage good reading habits and develop a lifelong love of reading.
- Create a print-rich environment. Simply having books and magazines throughout the house can help stimulate their reading.
- Make sure your children see you read. Children like to imitate and play grown-up. This social learning sends a positive message to an early reader about the importance of reading. In addition, your child is reinforced to value reading, because his parents value reading. And, he feels connected to you, when associating all those good attachment feeling of love, warmth and bonding with reading.
- Visit your local library. A family trip to the library is a wonderful source for many activities. This includes taking turns reading to one another, sharing interests, and opportunities for you and your child to write and discuss your choices of reading material. You can also record stories that you and your children create for one another, to be played back at bedtime or by a babysitter when you have a date night.
- Encourage your children to connect with other children outside of school. Having a pen pal or a weekend or after-school book club is a free and fabulous way of engaging reading and writing, English, and literature.
- Spell F-U-N with family game nights. Family game night including Scrabble, Taboo, or crossword puzzles, is a great way for your child to polish up on spelling, which helps with reading.
- Get into the act with the whole family. Putting on family plays, writing scripts, rehearsing and memorizing parts, can help your child not only learn about writing and organization, but also about story telling and story structure.
