February 25, 2024
Teaching Kids to Love Reading
Do you wish your child loved to read? Reading is a skill that has significant, lifelong benefits. Reading is not easy to learn, but its importance makes it paramount that all children learn. Perhaps even more difficult than learning to read is inspiring children to be intrinsically motivated to read, but it can be done! Every child can be a joyful, confident, and independent reader. Often, it just takes a little bit of help.
If your child is struggling with reading, you are not alone. Across the country, 2/3 of kids do not read at grade level. This matters. Children who don’t read proficiently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to eventually drop out of school. By contrast, students with strong reading skills excel in school and beyond. They have broader vocabularies, better spelling, stronger writing skills, more general knowledge, higher test scores, and greater confidence.
Children are motivated by their interests, so finding books about things that they enjoy is an important step towards building motivated readers. Reading every day is beneficial regardless of the material that children are reading. Focusing on their interests helps children be motivated to pick up a book and read on their own. Additionally, children often get into reading by experimenting with various genres. Children who are motivated to read by a favorite genre or character often become more confident readers. Enjoying reading means children choose to do it more, and this extra practice continues to build skills.
Another crucial step in the process of building motivated readers is modeling reading for fun at home. Children are often made to read in school, and this can take the joy and relaxation out of reading. When children see adults frequently read for fun at home, they are more likely to read themselves. Continuing to read to children as they mature as readers is also a great way to build independent, inspired readers. When children share reading as an activity and have it modeled for them, they become intrinsically motivated readers.
Rally Reader is here to help your child become a motivated, empowered, and excited reader. Rally Reader was purpose-built to support young readers, and we even have books adults might enjoy!
Rally Reader offers 50,000+ e-books, each with a built-in, digital reading coach that provides real-time error correction for misread and skipped words. Real-time feedback on oral reading is the #1 way to improve, and Rally Reader provides it 24/7, built into the popular books kids love!