3 Crucial Keys to Raising Kids Who Love Reading
It probably comes as no surprise: I’ve always loved reading. As a kid, I read above my grade level and read alone for pleasure, working my way through whole series of books like the Ramona books by Beverly Cleary; then the Little House on the Prairie books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and soon after the Anne of Green Gables series and other books by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I absolutely attribute my spelling ability to the fact that I read so much when I was younger, and reading has definitely played a part in building my confidence as an EAL/ESL teacher. I am sure it was also part of what influenced me to want to become a teacher from a young age (the Ramona series was deeply rooted in school stories, and both Anne of Green Gables, the fictional character, and Laura Ingalls, a real person, became teachers).
Because reading seemingly came naturally to me and I loved it, it always surprised me when I encountered a kid who said they didn’t like to read. Not enjoying reading or not wanting to do it at all is unfortunate because I would argue that reading influences the way in which you can become a critical thinker and it is not only a useful and necessary skill for a wide range of tasks and responsibilities as you grow into adulthood, but also it plays a huge role in overall brain health and functionality into old age. In fact, a “...study published in Neurology in 2021 found that high levels of cognitive activity, such as reading… and writing letters, can delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by 5 years among those aged 80 years and over.”
As I grew up, I came to realise that there are probably a few key things that have to happen in order for someone to love reading:
Key 1
You have to find your preferred format for reading.
Key 2
If you don’t love the subject matter of stories that are offered up to you to read, you have to keep looking to find the niches that make you feel like they were written for you.
Key 3
If you have any reading disability or acute difficulty, you’re going to need adults who notice and are helpful to you so you don’t lose confidence, and therefore interest, too early on.
In terms of reading “formats”, the average kid is likely to move from storybooks to some snippets of other kinds of works as part of schoolwork and then attempt to read a few novels by the time they reach high school graduation. If none of those novels grabbed a particular student’s heart and mind, chances are that person will leave school saying they don’t read much and don’t enjoy it. But there are so many other forms that the written word has taken aside from storybooks and novels, such as poetry, chapter books, short stories, novellas, graphic novels, comic books, essays, magazine articles, and more.
The actual physical book itself has taken on new formats in the digital age. Some people became avid readers only after the Kindle or its copycats were invented, while others still love the old school, tactile experience of turning the pages of a real book (and that “book smell”….ahhh.). And of course podcasts and audiobooks are becoming more and more recognized as valid formats for promoting and increasing literacy. For example, my sister's eldest child participated in their local library's "Summer Reading Challenge" where both of these formats were included as options that "counted toward" a child's timed daily literacy activity goal; her kid loves reading and being read to, and frequently chooses to use strictly limited tablet-time to listen to works read to aloud via the Khan Academy Kids app.
When it comes to what subject matter sparks readers’ interest, it’s likely that most people are fans of fiction. Humans are nothing without our stories, and finding the right genre(s) and authors of fiction can make-or-break whether your kid becomes a book lover. But assuming that there simply has to be a fiction genre out there for your kid might overshadow one important thing: non-fiction books! Our company, Little Crab Educational Press (LCEP), is a sister-owned boutique publishing house, but we have an older brother too, one who was excellent at school but had never become an avid fiction reader. Instead, long form articles in architectural magazines are more his jam. To each their own!
I had a reading-related experience at school when I was twelve years old that planted one of the seeds that would later grow into what LCEP is today: I had finished my work and the teacher asked me to “help” other kids with their reading. On the one hand, little future-teacher me was stoked to be tasked with this; on the other hand I had absolutely no idea how to do it. Nevertheless I approached one classmate named Jesse who seemed to be blankly staring at his book instead of reading and I asked him a few questions to get an idea of why he wasn’t “really” reading. I noticed that because he had both pages of the chapter book spread open, there was a lot of negative and positive space left by the contrast between the black words and greyish-white pages behind them. I asked if he normally looks at the whole page and if he gets distracted by the words on the entire page, to which he said yes. I didn’t know what dyslexia was at the time, and maybe he didn’t have it, but I obviously had the instinct to look at how the presentation of text was affecting his reading ability and interest. I ended up suggesting that he use a piece of paper or ruler to cover the rest of the text and allow him to focus on just one sentence at a time, rather than get overwhelmed by all the words he had not yet read, making him feel like he was swimming upstream against a strong current. As I recall, this method relaxed him, and he got farther down the page than he was expecting. It was such a nice feeling to be able to help.
I have witnessed first-hand what can happen when a learning disability goes undiagnosed for too long. My sister, Lisa, always struggled with reading-related tasks in elementary school, and that led to a long-held (thankfully and rightfully now-dispelled) belief that she was "dumb" or incapable of learning on the same level as her peers. There were so many things she was good at in school, and she had an above-grade-level vocabulary, so it was missed for a long time: Combined with being a terrible speller, she was reading at about 1/5 to 1/4 the speed of her peers, was always falling behind as a result, and became exhausted - struggling yet determined - to complete tasks that appeared to come easily to others. She wasn't flagged for learning disability testing until the age of 13 and didn't actually undergo testing until closer to 16. It took her years to unlearn the negative things she believed about herself, and from when she was finally diagnosed more than a decade had passed before she was able to fall in love with reading. The struggle is not always an obvious one; Lisa’s was largely concealed in the fact that she is the kind of person who works at things that are hard if she thinks they matter, and she views the importance of reading the same way I do, so she never outright refused to try. All this is to say that, if your child struggles to enjoy reading, and you've tried all the combinations of the first two keys you can think of to help them love it, take a close look at where else their struggles might be coming from and do some research to investigate whether there might be something else at play there.
I was lucky that I loved reading English from an early age because it meant I was able to build up my extensive reading skills in my mother tongue quickly and easily, which led to, as I mentioned, strong spelling skills and the confidence to teach EAL/ESL later on. But when I started learning Mandarin as a teenager, I found myself wishing that the text in the books I was reading was presented in a particular way in order to make my experience of studying less interrupted by certain roadblocks. I do believe that if I had storybooks to read when I was a beginner learner of Mandarin like the ones we at LCEP produce, my momentum would not have been interrupted so often and my ability to complete whole storybooks in one go would have increased exponentially. Instead, I did not build up my extensive reading skills in Mandarin nearly as quickly as I should have and I feel like I am playing catch up for that now!
My dissatisfaction with how most bilingual Mandarin and English kids’ books are formatted was a major contributing factor as to why I eventually developed Text Scaffolding, which was first presented in our flagship book Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任. Now, some teachers or parents may wonder if this is the same thing as scaffolded reading comprehension, and while it certainly will aid in reading comprehension, “scaffolding reading comprehension” is a teaching methodology that allows teachers to guide students through content concepts, whereas LCEP’s Text Scaffolding is a specific way in which the actual text itself is laid out on the page. (If you are interested in learning more about guiding readers through content concepts, we recommend Adrienne Gear’s work). In other words, the way we display Chinese characters, Pinyin and English in LCEP storybooks is very intentional.
Those who read a lot of Chinese children’s books with Pinyin will notice that normally the Pinyin goes on top and characters are underneath but there is a reason why our books have Simplified Chinese characters on top, Pinyin in the middle, and English on the bottom. LCEP storybooks are intended to help three types of readers and their needs. Our goal is to:
- demystify Mandarin for native English speakers,
- make it easier for native Mandarin speaking expats to maintain their mother tongue for their child(ren), and
- (for those who study English) make it easier for native Mandarin speakers to achieve a deeper understanding of English
In order to have a firm grasp of Mandarin, a student must learn Chinese characters and not rely solely on Pinyin. But if you are reading a book with Pinyin on top of characters, while you may be able to challenge yourself by covering the Pinyin with a ruler and slide it up when you need a hint about pronunciation, you would still have the roadblock, or, momentum-killer of having to leave the story to check a dictionary if you don’t know the meaning in English. With LCEP storybooks, both the Pinyin and the English can be covered up by a piece of paper or a ruler underneath the characters and then your chosen cover can be slid down by one line for pronunciation, and a second time to reveal the English words/meaning. And for Mandarin speakers learning English, the characters and Pinyin can be covered on top, and the ruler or paper being used to cover them can simply be slid up by one line to reveal the Pinyin as a hint, and if necessary, slid up one more line to reveal the characters if the student still can’t remember the meaning. If you want a visual example of what LCEP’s Text Scaffolding is, just check out this short, handy-dandy demo video on our YouTube channel.
Another key difference between our bilingual storybooks and others that I find out there is that most textbooks or stories that come with glossaries come with ones that are incomplete. This means when you encounter a word you don’t understand, it may not appear in the glossary at all, and once again you have to leave the story to check a dictionary. That was another inconvenience I wanted to eliminate with our stories and is the reason that our glossaries include every single word in each story, listed in the order of appearance. In other words, dictionaries do not need to be nearby in order for LCEP stories to be useful study tools for both English speakers learning to read Mandarin and Mandarin speakers learning to read English as well as Mandarin speakers looking to pass on their mother language.
One final tip to leave you with from our April blog post, in case you missed it. This one works for adults and kids, but kids especially may enjoy adding this very simple and tactile piece of technology to their reading practice. And, unbeknownst to me, it is essentially the same thing I was recommending Jesse use all those years back:
“If you have any reading disability such as a type of dyslexia, or you just get distracted easily when you are reading text, transparent tinted window reading guides are a fantastic tool (and they make great bookmarks!). You can pick-up or order these paragraph-sized ones (those come in yellow) or these single-sentence ones (also referred to as ‘sentence strips’, they come in a small variety of colours as well as clear) from our favourite independent, family-owned-and-operated, woman-managed teachers’ store, School House Teaching Supplies. We especially love the single-sentence ones for enhancing the ways students can challenge themselves when reading our Text Scaffolded kids’ books such as Let's Pretend! - Ràng Wǒmen Jiǎxiǎng - 让我们假想! or Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任, because you can slide the viewing window up or down to cover or reveal the Chinese Characters, Pinyin, or English words as you see fit.”
Now, in the spirit of sharing both my love of reading and my love of Mandarin with you, we’ve developed a series of holiday-themed reading trackers including one with a Mid-Autumn Festival theme just in time for that holiday. We are selling the trackers in Our Little Shop for $3 as an instant digital download, but I am happy to offer the whole dual-language series for free to those who want to sign up to receive our monthly Newsletter.
Until next time, happy studying!
快乐学习! 下次见！
Rebecca