How Parents Can Help Their Children in Developing the Reading Habit
Reading is the habit that galvanizes your personality on a daily basis and makes you a forever learner. That is why it is very important to cultivate reading habits into children. But encouraging children to read has been a challenge as long as there have been kids and books and in today’s era when mobile phones, video games, and other gadgets are overflowing in market, children consider bookshops a place from a parallel universe.
Reading is very essential for children not only to have command over their language and vocabulary but also to impart confidence in them. Reading helps to improve the thought process of children and also builds their personality. In the modern business world where so much communication takes place digitally, over email and text-based messaging systems the ability to read for comprehension and to communicate effectively is vital and needs to be taught at a young age. Though many of the best schools in Odisha leave no stone unturned to help students in developing the reading habit, parents also have to play their part.
Here are some ways in which parents can help their children in developing the reading habit:-
1. Start by making reading a fun activity for your children. Keeping in mind the child’s language skill, give him a short-story to read every day with some fun task assigned with it. Like at the end of the story you can ask your child to describe his favorite character from the story or to pinpoint his favorite parts from the story. This will help children to read with some fun motive and eventually day by day they will get more lured into reading.
2. Surround your children with more and more reading material. Introduce your children to a wide variety of books, make sure they find a large collection of reading resources in their homes. Many schools like some of the top schools in Bhubaneswar have vast libraries with abundant reading treasure overflowing there but yet to provoke a reading habit in children it is essential that they find the same reading environment at their place too. The more and more children are exposed to literature and find books as a part of their lifestyle, the more reading will become part of their daily life.
3. Apart from regular reading, encourage more and other forms of reading activities too. Like when you are in the market or shopping mall ask your children to read the cafeteria names, name of his favorite ice-cream brand, roadside signs, etc. Sit together on the weekend and choose any animated or children genre Hollywood movie with subtitles and watch it.
4. It is always better to show them rather than telling them. Children learn more from actions so make sure whatever you are preaching to your children you yourselves are implementing it otherwise it would be all in vain. Many best CBSE schools in Odisha counsel how the reading habit in parents is more likely to be adopted by their children rather than school forcing it on them as a task.
5. With today’s generation more inclined towards gadgets and mobile phones, try to switch the use of this technology in their favor. Install useful reading apps on your smartphones or tablets where children can read without you worrying about what they might come across online. Also, you can fulfill their wish of playing games by installing some of the vocabulary building games like word cross, etc.
6. Make yourself aware of the variety and genre of books and then help your children choose age-appropriate books that will match their interests. Take them to the bookshops and libraries and help them with some good books but make sure you give them a liability to choose what they want to read. This is equally important as letting children have the choice of their reading material goes a long way in raising life-long readers.
Conclusion: Thus for children, reading is very important for their overall development and nurturing their soft skills so as to survive in today’s competitive world and parents play a very major role in cultivating the reading habit in children. Though difficult, with the above-mentioned ways parents can surely help their children in developing the reading habit.