What to do if a child categorically refuses to read? Some use violent methods, others quickly retreat and decide that their child will get by in life without reading. Both paths cannot be called correct. The problem is much easier to solve. Our article will help you understand how to teach a child to read books and how parents should act correctly.
From this article you will learn
Children who are truly in love with reading fiction, is becoming increasingly rare today. Schoolchildren aged 7–10 find it difficult to answer the question: “What is your favorite book?”
It's easier for them to tell what kind of comic they are last time held in their hands what cartoon they watched over the weekend. Teachers, parents, intellectuals are horrified. But this is a modern reality. Children all over the world are gradually stopping reading. This fact is confirmed by social surveys and studies by psychologists.
On a note! Russia remains among the top countries in terms of the number of people reading. We occupy 7th place after China, Thailand, Egypt, the Philippines, and the Czech Republic. According to statistics, 46% of the literate population consider themselves to be readers, 61% of them are students.
Before deciding how to force your child to read books on his own without tears and hysterics, find out the reason for his reluctance to do this. You don’t need to solve this riddle yourself; ask the student directly: what’s stopping him from devoting 1–2 hours or at least 30 minutes to a book every day?
Children usually answer like this:
A small child is lazy or you offer him the “wrong” books. Use this trick: interest your offspring in a fairy tale or story based on a movie you watched. For example, “Beauty and the Beast” - for girls, “Shrek”, “Harry Potter” - for boys. There is no need to strain your imagination unnecessarily to imagine the scene; you can remember pictures from films.
A child may get tired of a boring story. It is useless to convince and persuade him to read even a page of an uninteresting book. Review your children's library at home. If it contains nothing but classics, and these books, according to parents, are the best for brain development and literacy, then the situation becomes more understandable.
Invite the student to independently decide on the choice of book. Consider his age and interests. For example, in primary school, schoolchildren enjoy reading “The Adventures of Uncle Fyodor...” rather than “Alice in Wonderland.”
Lying with a novel on the couch after work - perfect option recreation for adults. And children need to change their sitting position to running, playing in the yard, so their body gets rid of mental stress and gains strength.
Important! Pay attention to the volume of the work. If the child does not want to read, choose stories of 1–2 pages. Soon the student will understand that reading is easy and does not take much time.
How much literature does your child read?
Poll Options are limited because JavaScript is disabled in your browser.
Doesn't read at all, except for lessons 69%, 223 vote
Reads a couple of times a week for 15-30 minutes 17%, 56 votes
Reads for about 30 minutes almost every day 8%, 27 votes
Reads more than 1 hour every day 5%, 16 votes
26.03.2019
Modern children develop quickly; many children know the alphabet and begin to read at the age of 2–4 years. But this is not their desire, but the desire of adults to keep up with their neighbors, to show that their son or daughter is the most capable.
If the method of teaching reading in early age If used incorrectly at home, preschoolers are forced to swallow a lot of volumes of uninteresting literature, then events will begin to develop along a dangerous path.
Let's talk about three common situations. If you recognize yourself in them, urgently seek parental advice from a kindergarten teacher or primary school teacher.
An educated, intelligent mother decided that her son would not be like modern children; books would become his constant companions. To help your child quickly fall in love with reading, we will spend whole days with books. If he reads the entire home library before school, he will be the smartest in the class.
The family devoted all their efforts to teaching their son to read. At the age of 2, Kolya knew the alphabet; at the age of 3, by the age of 4, he independently mastered simple fairy tales.
Then a number of necessary books were lined up in front of the kindergartener, which he must read before first grade. These were not fairy tales and poems, but myths different nations world literature, children's encyclopedias and other useful literature. Mom and Dad helped as best they could, convinced, and controlled the amount of reading.
Soon Kolya really became the most knowledgeable among his classmates in kindergarten. But he closed himself off and stopped communicating with his peers and parents. After going to a psychologist, the parents learned that Kolya was exhausted. He didn’t want to read volumes of uninteresting stories and epics at all, but he was afraid of punishment.
This is a clear example of unusual domestic violence. The child plays the role of a toy in the hands of mom and dad. Adults need to understand that reading is not the main source of information; to gain experience in life, communication with others is necessary.
You cannot raise a child in isolation, set impossible tasks for them, even if you love them endlessly and want only the best. A child who finds himself in a similar situation will develop a dislike for reading very quickly.
At the age of 4, Polina did not know letters and this greatly upset her mother. Her parents were unable to introduce her to the ABC book without scandals, so they decided to do it with the help of computer exercises. The girl really liked the game, she quickly learned all the letters, but at the same time became interested in other interesting games.
She still didn't want to read books, but she demanded a computer every day. The parents set a condition: if Polina reads 1–2 pages, she will gain access to the gadget. The girl read with tears in her eyes, and then ran to play online.
The problem for this family is that they did not understand how to encourage their daughter and how to get her interested in reading. That is, they replaced themselves with a computer game. The girl received knowledge, but did not apply it in reality.
Computer games interfere with the development of imagination, willpower, and intuition. Graphics and interactivity do half the work for the preschooler. They should be used in minimal quantities.
Reading books is hard work. To imagine a picture of the forest where Masha got lost from the fairy tale “The Three Bears”, you need to try. But it develops the brain and intellect much more effectively.
Misha learned to read quickly at the age of 4. At six years old, books were devoured one by one. The parents were happy with their son's success. They boasted to their acquaintances about his achievements. The child was asked what his favorite book was. The smart guy couldn't answer. He was asked to tell what book he read today, yesterday? The child had no answer.
It turned out that Misha did not understand what he read, but simply carefully pronounced sounds and put words into sentences to the delight of his mother. He doesn’t think about the content of the fairy tale.
This kind of reading is called mechanical. Children are not immersed in the informative field of the work. This is how their parents teach them to read. After all, the mother simply asks him to read, and does not ask what he liked, what he remembered. Children complete the assigned task completely.
Mechanical reading is typical of preschoolers and adult children who brush off teachers and parents and do homework under duress and in a tired state. To avoid the syndrome, you need to monitor not only the speed of the child’s speech when reading, but talk about the plot, fantasize about its continuation, and constantly interest him in new works.
On a note! In elementary school, students are tested on their reading technique. Many parents think that the most important thing is to read quickly. In fact, several parameters are taken into account: reading speed, cleanliness (no errors), compliance with logical pauses, understanding of the plot of the text.
Accustoming to a book begins not in the first or second grade or kindergarten, but in infancy. If parents recite poetry to their infants and show beautiful illustrations from collections of jokes and nursery rhymes after 6 months, then the adult child will get used to daily reading faster.
Parents often confuse the concepts of “love of books” and “need for daily reading.” It is impossible to instill an enthusiastic attitude towards literature through intimidation and hysterics. Let your child understand that a book is a source of knowledge and sensations that cannot be obtained from a TV or computer. Love reading yourself, then your child will follow the example of adults.
Important! At an early age and primary school, do not let your child read electronic versions of books. Reading is not only a visual process, but also a tactile one. The love of books begins with the touch of rustling pages and the smell of printing ink.
Here's what he advises child psychologist Marina Romanenko.
There are many ways to teach your child to read; choose one or several at once. A reminder with recommendations will help you avoid confusion.
Another interesting option teaching reading is suitable for sociable families. Get your teenager's friends interested in literature. Create a home book club. Invite schoolchildren to visit 1-2 times a week, provide them with a good library, encourage them to choose works by discussing literary novelties.
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Adults think that reading is a given. That it's easy. But for a toddler, reading is a difficult process, and children get tired easily. The child needs to recognize the letter, remember sound pronunciation, connect letters into syllables, syllables into words. You need to keep your attention on the text, understand what you read, and keep the plot in your head.
Reading, like any skill, requires practice. It takes time for the reading process to become easy and enjoyable.
“How can I get them to read?” - a fundamentally wrong question! Under no circumstances should a child be “forced.” Coercion forever causes a negative attitude towards any business. And reading is no exception here. If parents turn reading into a dull “obligation,” then the child will form the belief that reading is terrible, bad and difficult.
As a rule, parents themselves live with reading trauma. They remember how they were forced to read as children - and pass on the habit of painful reading-punishment to their children. How to break this vicious circle?
How to get your child to read on his own, regularly and with pleasure?
Let’s address this question to the neuropsychologist, head of the “Super Brain” school, Guzel Abdulova.
It is very important to teach a child to read correctly, to lay a solid foundation for effective reading and speed of thinking. Your child has learned to read syllables. He knows all the letters well, puts them into syllables, syllables into words. But he reads slowly, cannot retell the text and answer questions. What to do?
First of all, it is important to understand that at each stage of developing fluent reading skills, specific skills appear and develop.
The transition to the next stage is possible only when all the skills of the previous stage are automated!
It is important to take into account that each child is individual. Often a child simply does not have enough time to reach a confident level. The material becomes more difficult, the child begins to lag behind others and ends up in the group of underachievers. Failures multiply and develop into an insoluble conflict. Of course, this situation discourages any desire to read.
Problems arise not because the child cannot understand and learn, but because he does not have time to develop at an uncomfortable pace.
What to do?
I offer several interesting games to quickly turn reading from a boring activity into fun!
You will find a system of games and training exercises in my training book “Reading after the ABCs: Developing Speed Reading.” In just 10 weeks of regular lessons, you will eliminate all your child’s reading difficulties. The program is described in detail step by step: breathing, articulation, games for practicing reading skills and detailed guidelines will help create an atmosphere of exciting, entertaining and useful communication.
It’s easy to turn reading into pleasure! published.
Based on the book by Guzel Abdulova “Reading after the ABCs: Developing Speed Reading”
P.S. And remember, just by changing your consciousness, we are changing the world together! © econet
Most sadly state that modern schoolchildren prefer smartphones and TV to books. And, invariably popular among mothers.
The editor of the site, Natalya Kovtun, mother of 9-year-old Sasha, has an alternative view on children's reading. The child does not want to read - and there is no need. There will be something to occupy him besides books.
My nine year old son doesn't read books. At all.
He has a mother and father who read voraciously, but of his own free will he will not read a single line beyond the school curriculum.
They say to me: how can this be? After all, reading is the development of everything: speech, intellect, imagination! Here are hundreds of articles on how to train (motivate, force, emphasize what is necessary).
Thank you, I answer, but it’s not necessary.
We have been using everything that these articles advise for a long time. There is no TV in the house, but there are books. Parents are reading. Reading together before bed is generally a fetish and a tool for mutual manipulation: “If you’re not in bed by 10, I don’t read.” “If you don’t read to me, I won’t sleep.”
My son loves stories in books. But the letters in books are not.
He was born and raised in the era of computer interactivity. Making him fall in love with black letters on a white sheet is like driving back into the ocean that dinosaur that was the first to grow lungs and come out to live on land. To drive and mutter that all ancestors breathed, as expected, with gills. And he, you see, has lungs; he needs air, you see.
Take the same computer games: here you have intelligence, imagination, and creativity. (Computer? How can that be! Here are hundreds of thousands of articles on how to distract, prohibit, wean)
Let's be honest. As a child, didn’t you dream of a book where the pictures in it did not lie dead on the page, but moved, like in a cartoon? And would they show everything that is written on the page?
And even better - for you to sit and read. And then I wanted to - hop - and you are in the book, in the story itself. Like a hero in a movie. And you don’t just do what the author came up with for you, but you decide what to do. Who to help, who to fight. Whom to save, so that where everything ended badly, now ends well.
Our children received all this for nothing, as a birthright in the digital age. They are not satisfied with letters on paper - their stories and fairy tales live in completely different spaces and scales. They are free to choose their own roles and behavior. They are not consumers of history, but co-authors.
And we are trying to take away this right from them and return them to the letters on the sheet. Why?
Because those letters were written by someone we consider smart and important? Because we ourselves once read these letters and liked it?
Or is it because we associate the development of intelligence with painful necessity, and not with entertainment?
Perhaps my child will outgrow his denial of books and understand the taste of reading. Or perhaps not. I don't see a problem with this.
But I see that he perceives audio-visual information much easier than text. And that the BBC video gives him more than a natural history textbook. And that in his Minecraft he learned more English words than in his lessons at school.
Here we’ll add improved spatial thinking and the ability to make logical constructs, which is what Minecraft is based on. And the ability to hold detailed pictures in your head, and the ability to operate complex processes.
In my head - because the tablet is on a schedule, and plans for the game are spinning in my head non-stop. You have to visualize and calculate actions purely speculatively.
Virtual reality is something my child is already better at than me. A few more years, and in some things he will be hopelessly ahead of me. Your children will overtake you too, no matter how many books you and I read.
There is no need to hold them by the tail and not let them try new things, just because they can do more than we could at their age.
That's why I sometimes allow you to sit in the game longer when you really need to finish building something urgently. And I restrain myself when I want to reproach: “It would be better to do something useful.”
Photo: Natalya Burukhina
I love reading. More precisely, this is not a completely appropriate verb: after finishing a book, I simply suffer on a physical level if I cannot find something new and interesting for a long time. Immerse yourself in the world of drama or detective, intrigue or wandering. But it was not always so.
I was surrounded by reading people: parents, grandparents, their friends... But I remember well how I wasted away over “Tom Sawyer” and “Conduit and Schwambrania,” barely finishing the measured 10–20 pages. But then something clicked... and I began to read avidly. I don’t know what happened, just as I don’t know if this will happen in the lives of my children (in my heart I really hope so, I won’t lie).
Having become a mother, I, like millions of parents, was faced with the fact that children do not always follow the example of their parents. So I immediately remember the joke of my university psychology teacher that a person is shaped not only by the environment, but also by Thursday and Friday... Moreover, if the eldest son reads and even takes the initiative, then the daughter has to really be forced to sit down with a book, at least from school list. Sadness and pain that haunt me.
Yes, we have a lot of books at home. Yes, we buy a lot of new products with beautiful illustrations and everything. Yes, I read aloud to the children. Yes, I explained that reading develops us like nothing else. Yes, I explained that this would affect my outlook and academic performance. Yes, I swore.
Now I'm hiding and waiting. Although sometimes I force you, and even, like a mother echidna, I demand that you retell what you read. I'm not so naive that I don't know how easy it is to pretend that you're reading... 25 pages in 3 minutes in second grade.
And now to the main thing, to what excited me. I have, of course, encountered such ideas before, but last week one young man surprised me that I was delusional:
Why do you need to love reading? modern world?! All the necessary information can be found in a split second. I remembered it - great, no - I found it again. What difference does it make to me what Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Remarque thought? I decide everything in my life myself, and those problems are very far from us. Why this extra baggage? It's just garbage in my head.
Daleks?! Garbage?! Is it true?! I have a lot to say about this, but for some reason I can't get it all out of my head. After all, everything is simple and cynical. Only the rational component of our world. If you need it, you found it, you got it, if you don’t need it, don’t bother.
Maybe it’s true that no one needs our preoccupation with expanding children’s horizons, imagination, and thinking. Are we just old fools?
What do you think? To force or not, to cultivate love and taste or not?
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