How to Encourage Your Kid’s Love Of Reading (Without Turning Your Home Into A Library)
There may be no sweeter sound to a parents’ ears than a child’s newfound love of reading.
(Or, no sweeter lack of sound!)
Beyond the momentary silence and eye-of-the-storm calm that come with a child sitting on their own, flipping through a stack of books, there are also numerous developmental benefits that come from your child reading.
Benefits like improved concentration, vocabulary, language skills, imagination, and empathy, to start.
Sadly, it’s not all awesome advantages. There can be some serious downsides to your kid learning to read. Downsides that parents only talk about in hushed whispers at school open houses. Shared looks of understanding. The deception, the disappointment, the depression…
That comes from your home’s shellshocked interior design.
Gone are your days of Architectural Digest dreams. Now, instead of Grecian columns, you have load-bearing columns of picture books.
Though said with our tongues firmly in our cheeks, most parents do come to a point where their bookshelves are bursting and they may need to consider how to continue feeding their kids’ reading fire without actually acquiring more books.
We have a few recommendations that might just help you gain a bit of control back over the bookshelves.
4 Ways To Help Your Child Read Without Buying New Books
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Libraries, Both Big... - Hardly a new suggestion, of course, but encouraging the use of your local library can reward all that book-reading energy by giving your child a chance to engage with other kids through scavenger hunts, contests, and theater - without resulting in more books.
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And Little - Little Free Libraries, that is. With more than 100,000 of these little libraries on streets around the world, you can drop off finished books for other kids in the community to read. Your family can even make an adventure of scheduling longer and longer walks or bike reads to scout out all the creatively designed little libraries in your neighborhood.
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Hand-Me-Down - It can be hard for kids to let go of the books they love. Sometimes a little bribery can go a long way, so maybe they find that for every 5-10 books they give to a neighbor or younger cousin, a new book magically appears!
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Turn Screen Time To Reading Time - Though we all have our philosophies and strategies about screen time, it’s possible to make the best of it with these apps that help kids learn to read, including apps like Epic that give access to thousands of books (without the mess).
We all recognize that we’re in a good situation when our kids love reading. An accomplishment on its own, we also wanted to encourage it, so it’s one of the reasons we included book-reading as one of the coins of our Early Achievers IRLA Pack.
(And if you’re open to adding at least one more book to your library, why not consider our own holiday tale, the Carol of the Coin?)
What about you? How do you handle the ever-increasing amount of books in your home?