Eat, Sleep, Read!
Read to your kids, they say. Read as many things as you can, as much as you can. Sure. Reading to your kids is easy! …until sometimes, it isn’t. Sometimes your baby wants to do nothing but eat the books, sometimes your toddlers want to rip them to shreds, and sometimes it’s hard to find time because Life. Is. Busy. There are honestly so many reasons why it can be difficult to spend “enough” time reading. The experts all recommend twenty minutes a day of reading aloud to your child, but my recommendation is much more. My recommendation is to read as much as you can possibly fit in, every single day. Read on to find out how.
Reading aloud builds vocabulary, it builds comprehension, improves your child’s communication skills, it strengthens your bond, it builds cultural literacy, it helps your child to develop empathy and compassion, it gives them a window into the entire rest of the world (and eras past!)...there are a million and one reasons to do a ton of reading. If you need some motivation or want to see the research behind it, I’ve got all that research here.
However…this post is not the WHY, this post is the HOW. Here are my strategies to increase the number of minutes spent reading aloud to your child AND increase their desire to hear you read aloud.
Keep books everywhere. The easiest thing you can do, right from the start of your child’s life, is to have books readily available everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Keep books in every bedroom, in the kitchen, in the playroom, in the car, in the bathroom, in the living room…intentionally tour your entire house and make sure there is a book space in every single room. When I say a “book space” I’m not talking about anything fancy or complicated. It can be a perfect, comfy, cozy little book nook with the perfect curtains and pillows and the most trendy little bookshelf…or it can be a basket, bag, or bucket in the corner. It really doesn’t matter as long as those books are easy to grab when you have a spare moment. When your child is suddenly calm or regulated or the mood strikes or you just happen to have the time and the stars align, you don’t want to have to go searching for a book.
Those stars will un-align so fast during your search. By the time you find a book, your willing audience will likely be gone, having moved on to wrecking the sofa or chasing the cat or wanting a snack. In addition to books being easy to grab and convenient, having them everywhere sends the subconscious message to your child that books are important; books are a worthwhile expenditure of space in their life. Being surrounded by books everywhere they turn will cause them to spend more time looking at books, whether they intend to or not. We even take books to the park, just in case! What if everyone gets tired and needs to sit for a few minutes? What if someone gets hurt and needs a cuddle and a distraction? Books. Always books.
Use your captive audience. I started employing this strategy when my first was a newborn. I read to that baby every time she nursed. It was so easy and can absolutely also be done while bottle feeding. (Bonus - when they’re really tiny babies, you don’t even have to read their books - you can read yours aloud!) Eventually, she started to bring books to me when she wanted to nurse. The two went hand in hand - I filled her tummy and her brain at the same time. The natural progression of this was to use snacks and meals as reading time, as well.
Obviously a lot of the time I eat alongside my family. I don’t skip eating to read. However, now that I have a small herd of tiny humans in my little informal school these days, it’s hard to capture their attention for reading all at the same time. So I DO use snack as reading time. And I DO use lunch as reading time. And then when they go off to play (or nap, hallelujah), I feed myself.
I adore our snack and lunch read alouds…everyone is calm and quiet and munching and listening so intently. It’s like the act of eating gives their kinetic energy a focus, which allows their brains to focus more intently on whatever I’m reading. I love it so much that occasionally, when my personal kids are wild and my husband and I are just staring at each other over the mayhem that is the dinner table, contemplating the marathon bedtime that awaits us, I give up on eating and pick up a book. They eat more, they argue less, they are less motivated to catapult themselves across the table, and we get to bedtime faster and more peacefully - and in that case, reading to them is less the goal and more a means to an end. But what a great means! Yet another captive audience situation occurs when they are hanging out in the bath. This ties back to point #1 - keep books everywhere!
Book rotation! I have mayyyyyybe a small problem with acquiring too many books. My husband used to try to convince me we had too many children’s books but he’s given up seen the light and now agrees that the problem is really that we need more bookshelves. Another solution to this kind of overcrowding problem that offers a bigtime dual bonus is “book rotation!”
The easiest way to begin to implement book rotation is to pull out all of your holiday/obviously seasonal books and store them away (preferably, while your kids are sleeping to avoid major meltdowns). Then pull out each holiday or season one at a time as each holiday rolls around. My kids get so excited to see each season’s books come out! The books become SO much more exciting than if they were just out all year round. A year or two ago, I also started doing this with the regular (nonseasonal) books. I pull out an entire box or two, store them away for a few months, and then get them out again. It’s like having new books! We do so much reading when those books come back out! The other bonus here is that you don’t get sick of reading the same book to your toddler 8,749 times in a row - although there is value in that, too!
I really love Halloween books…these are some of my favorites to get out every year!
An invitation to read! This is sort of related to book rotation, but it’s its own thing and worthy of its own bullet point. An invitation to read can take the form of a family trip to the library. Use that opportunity to model a ton of excitement. I do not personally have to fake my library excitement (you’re shocked, I’m sure). I just about lose my mind in our local children’s library!
Another invitation to read is something I used to do more when I had one child instead of three (ha - that could be a blog post all its own!). When my oldest was younger, I used to tidy up after she went to bed (spoiler alert: I don’t do much of that these days with three hooligans running around) and when I tidied, I would select two or three books to display on the couch. When she woke in the morning, she wanted to read those books immediately. Everything else was cleared away so those books were super obvious and carefully selected to engage her. She loved it! Although I don’t manage this as often anymore, it is still super effective when I do get my act together.
Model the life you want them to live. Let them see you reading. Talk about what you’re reading. Get excited about reading in your own life. Like it or not, your child wants to be everything you are. For better or worse, we are their first and most-emulated role models. I read a ton, but I’m usually reading on my kindle app on my phone which can appear as though I’m just casually scrolling. I try very hard to tell my kids that I’m reading my book and give them at least a simplified version of what it is I’m reading.
Get excited about reading! If you are not a reader by nature, pretend to be! Honestly. They won’t know you don’t really read a lot until it’s too late, after they’ve become such avid readers themselves that there’s no turning back. Another tip is to share what’s in your head if you’re enjoying a book of theirs, or of yours. If you find something funny or sweet about a kids book, tell them! If you come across a word you don’t know (which honestly happens all the time in picture books - the vocabulary is shockingly rich), tell them! Then tell them how you plan to find out what it means (online dictionary, anyone?), and what that process can look like. Model both the reading process and the joy of reading.
Switch it up! Try reading in different locations - this is a fun one around here. I’ve read to my kids in bed, in the bathtub, at the park, in the front yard under our favorite tree, in the blanket fort, in the car…I’m sort of the Sam I Am of reading. (Green Eggs and Ham, anyone?)
Make it routine. Yep, the total opposite of the above suggestion, but a vital component to turning kids into readers. Mix it up and keep it novel and fun but…also maintain some times of the day when you are absolutely always reading and preferably in the same space and routine (notice I said “timeS” plural?). Your young children will grow accustomed to those reading chunks of their day. They will anticipate those times with joy. They will take comfort in the familiar routines, and also it will never occur to them to do something other than read at that time.
Let them choose. Sometimes I set books out intentionally to interest them in those specific books. Sometimes I choose what we are reading at snack or lunch or any other opportunity. I try, though, to let my kids choose. If that means reading the same book six hundred times, try to hide the very real exasperation and fake it til you make it with that board book. I confess that I don’t love to read nonfiction. When my daughter chooses some awesome, high-quality straight-up nonfiction book, my insides groan. For me, those are so dry. Thankfully for science and our world in general, not everyone feels that way. I’d really like to avoid inspiring those feelings in my kids, so let me tell you how hard I fake the joy when she hands me some text about the life cycle of koalas. Sometimes they’re going to love the graphic novels that I also find not as much fun, or sometimes they’re going to choose that super long picture book that you feel like you don’t have time for before you make supper. Read it anyway. You won’t regret it. Which brings me to my last point…
(Try to) Never say no. This is wayyyyy easier said than done, but when your child brings you a book, try very hard to stop what you’re doing and read that book. Like I said in the previous paragraph, you won’t regret it. Your child will get the benefit of the story, AND they’ll enjoy the benefit of knowing that you chose your child in that moment. They will see that you prioritized them. They will also see that you prioritized reading, as well, which is just one more way to raise readers and build a reading lifestyle. I’m the first to admit that it’s not always convenient when I’m trying to fold laundry/cook supper/change the baby/drink a dang cup of coffee in peace for three seconds…but I do genuinely try to stop what I’m doing and read the book when they bring it to me. And if I truly can’t, I ask them to hang on until I can.
Do I get carried away when I talk about reading? ABSOLUTELY. Is it critical that your child learn to love and enjoy the written word? Also ABSOLUTELY. And the only way for that to happen is for you to make reading a priority. Read often, read widely, and read everywhere. Model reading. Discuss books. In short, do anything and everything you can to cram more books and words and the imagination that goes with them into those little brains!