People keep asking how I got my kid to be so into reading.
Here’s how. Between the ages of 1 and 6, when kids are already mobile but can’t entertain themselves for long periods of time, I told her stories. All the time I told stories. My mouth still hurts from all the stories I told.
As a result, she got used to constantly absorbing stories. Reading, as we all know, is hallucinating while awake. Words come in, and your brain starts creating images on their basis. Once you get used to this form of hallucination, to your brain creating images out of words, you can’t stop. It’s addictive.
Now my daughter seeks words to trigger the creation of images by herself. Of course, TV, screens, etc create images for you, and it’s so much easier. This is why stories should come first. Kids need to learn to create images out of words. That’s the number one goal. Then they won’t be seduced by the easy, ready-made images offered by screens.
Clarissa's Blog 
My youngest son is two and is absolutely obsessed with written word/letters. I did nothing different with him compared to my first two, in fact, I have less time and energy to devote to playing, reading, telling stories because there are two other kids who also need my attention. I think in his case it’s some intense innate desire to read and write. He’s taught himself the alphabet in 3 languages (English and Spanish we speak but he also taught himself the Russian alphabet which nobody in our family knows), phonics, and is beginning to read simple.words and sentences. he writes letters as well. Some he writes better than my four year old. It’s all he wants to do all day, every day. He sees letters everywhere. It’s reminds me of seeing images on the clouds, but for him it’s always letters and not just in the sky. Intense pattern recognition I suppose. It’s hard for me to keep up with him.
I want to continue to foster his intense desire for learning and the written word. I also want to be able to help him explore his desire for learning languages even though I don’t speak them (like a Russian). What would you suggest for my two year old?
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I remember Mom and Dad telling us stories about growing up in Cuba and then the United States, that fascinated us as kids and that’s why I have a lifelong love of 60s and 70s music and culture. I didn’t watch many cartoons growing up, the ones I did like had interesting characters and I would make up stories about them or rewrite episodes to end in different ways.
My dad was a self-taught historian and an admirer of British culture, he’d buy loads of books at yard sales and let us read whatever we wanted. So from a young age we were reading about history, all sorts of novels, comic books and anything else we found interesting. I remember reading history books and at first looking at the pictures and then reading them, same with medical textbooks. We’d also watch syndicated National Geographic specials and old TV shows from the 60s, I find old TV shows more interesting and better made than modern ones
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Nursery rhymes and poems, and learning songs by heart.
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We just read to them. Aloud. Every day.
Eldest is twelve, and on the rare occasion when schedules are too awful, or everybody has laryngitis or something, and bedtime read-aloud doesn’t happen… it is a family crisis. You would think we had taken away their new puppy. For the older two, learning to read was heavily contingent on us promising we would still read *to* them, even after they could do it themselves. Youngest had proof already that we’d not stop, so he is basically teaching himself to read, by learning to write. It’s fascinating to watch, and I’m trying so hard not to interfere with the process, since it’s going so well. He’s gone from zero to sounding out words by himself, and being able to write all the letters, from just… asking people how to write stuff, and adding text to his drawings.
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The very first thing I read to Klara aloud when she was a week old was a newspaper because I didn’t have the strength to get up and go look for something else. It was an article about Trump, and I credit her political position of today to that early reading experience. 😜😜😜
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If you haven’t seen it, check out the Draw, Write, Now series. It brings together drawing instructions with simple text in a way that your kid might enjoy since he is doing a lot of that on his own. My little one does drawing and writing independently too but she loves the added guidance.
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We read aloud every day too. The material has shifted somewhat but I still typically have a picture book, a mid elementary book, and a full length fiction every night to accommodate the age range. My teenagers sit at the table and work on projects while listening but we don’t all fit on the couch anymore anyway.
Education is hard work but this time is joyful and cozy.
Some of my kids are bigger readers than others, mostly due to neurological variation, but they all read for pleasure. The youngest is kindergarten age and I just mailed her first independent letter to her friends.
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My family did three things when I was young. My parents and Grandparents would read bedtime stories, we had a small library for that. Second while I’m not sure, I seem to recall mom saying one time before me and my sister were born she would read out loud, and play classical music. Lastly in K-5 ish she had bought this small box of books, it had three levels of books, and she would bribe me. Probably my sister too, but I don’t recall. Every reward the number of books I had to read to get the next toy went up. I assembled a small army of toys from that before mom had enough.
That built the reading skill, but I also need to mention that we also went to the library continuously. Not once or twice a year, but every week to every few weeks. The library allowed us to take a lot of books, like 20+ per person.
It had a good selection for kids, so I progressed from mostly picture books with a few words, to interesting books like the one about the knight who decided to open a pizza restaurant with a dragon instead fighting it.
This eventually lead to me wandering the stacks, finding books interesting to me, which lead to more advanced books. The Hardy Boys books were a frequent selection. As the years went on, that moved onto more advanced fantasy books, which inspired the imagination.
So my best advice on how to get the kids into reading, is two fold. First make sure they know how to read. It is unfortunate that this is a skill a lot of people no longer learn. Second take them to a proper library. By that I mean one with tons of shelves full of books rather than computers. Lastly leave the kids alone. Seriously. Let the kids wander about searching the stacks at random. Naturally start them off in the kids section, but if you let them wander, they will naturally gravitate to the books they find interesting. Those are the ones that will lead them into becoming a reader. Lastly don’t give up, this isn’t a one or two day process, it will likely take a few years, but at some point it becomes self reinforcing.
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My kid’s school has this kind of a “bribing” program. Kids compete among grades in who gets the most points reading books. The prizes are a pizza party, a movie party and an ice-cream party. Three years in a row my daughter wins all three prizes for her grade, it’s hilarious.
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My parents took us to the library all the time– they both had volunteer adult tutoring gigs they did there, and we would go hang out and pile up books to check out for a couple hours.
It irks me that I cannot do this with my own kids- the library here is a sitting room for addicts and the mentally ill, and I can’t let my kids wander unsupervised. And the selection is pretty lousy as well.
So we mostly go to the library bookstore where they sell off donations and discards, and we have assembled a pretty good home library.
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Your not wrong. The Library I go to was located in kind of a secluded area. It had a very interesting design and was stuffed full of books. When I grew up, few people used it, and it had a kind of sleepy feel to it, like it you sat down you would be out in moments. There was also 3 very old clunky computers too.
That library moved about half a decade to a decade ago onto a main-street in my city. The building is bigger, but they also started collecting the as you put it “addicts and the mentally ill”
The building was a old furniture store so you can image it was pretty big to start with. The left half of the building is a mix of DVS, Computers probably about 2 maybe 2 and a half dozen of them, and study rooms, plus random tables. Most of this I am fine with, but the majority of the people entering the library are their to use the computers rather than to read the books.
The right side was sectioned, they have a kids section that is walled off with an entrance. The other books are split into sections, though their organizational ability leaves much to be desired.
Then there is the feel to the place. The old location saw few people and had that sleepy ancient library feel to it. This one has a more dangerous feel to it due to some of the folks hanging around it. That being said this library kind of reminds me of how the city has gotten, so its not just it.
I don’t know. It just feels like things are getting worse everywhere, even the libraries, which is a darn shame.
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