Research shows that reading with your children is hugely beneficial, to their immediate development, and to their long-term success. Reading to your children exposes them to new vocabulary, allows them to develop their skills in concentration/focus, provides opportunities to develop their imagination/creativity, it gives space for bonding/connection, and it can contribute to the development of a life-long love of learning. Reading to your children models the logistics of reading (from left to right, top to bottom), and reading fluency. It allows an opportunity to develop reading comprehension. By asking “WH” questions, you can help your child think back about the story, and recall the main points, and details. This also allows an opportunity to practice memory, critical thinking, and inferencing.
So for kids who aren’t intrinsically motivated by listening to stories, how can reading be made more fun? Choosing books on topics of interest can be a simple way to engage young readers. Frozen fan? Grab a Frozen book! Spiderman? Get a comic book! Horse lover? There are tons of books for little about horses! Another way to engage readers, is to choose a book that has had a movie created from it. For example, in our home we recently read together the BFG, and then watched the movie once we were done. Getting to watch the movie following the book was highly anticipated for weeks, and was therefore made into quite a special event. Finally, some kiddos are highly motivated by technology. So if they’re resistant to listening to stories at the start, try incorporating some technology until you’ve gained their buy-in. Audiobooks, read alouds on YouTube, Scholastic stories on the computer, etc.
This is not just for super littles either. Although there is research supporting the importance of reading to children even before they seem to understand the words, it can also still be so beneficial to read with your older kiddos, as well. This will likely look very different (maybe more like a book club), but it can still yield the same benefits, and can be such a fun way to connect, as well.