3 Tips for National Reading Month with Tweens
March is National Reading Month. It is a time of celebration for book lovers. Although, truthfully, book lovers don’t need the calendar to encourage them to read. Some tweens, on the other hand, are not so thrilled to be in the population of readers. Still others would love to be readers, but reading is not something that comes easy to them.
Tweens, or middle grade readers, can fall into any of those three groups:
- Book lover
- Book friend – not so much
- Wanna be book lover
I posted on my personal blog about why I love to write for kids in the 8 – 12 year old range. You can read about it here. If your son or daughter is in the less than book friendly group or the wanna be reader group, this post is for you. Here are three ways to engage tweens, who might not do so easily, in reading.
Make It Look Like What Other Are Reading
Frequently, I see tweens who are struggling readers choose books that are way to difficult for them to read. Why? They want to be like their peers. They want to have the trendy books in their own book bag. Parents and teachers don’t need a reminder that the preteen years begin the surge towards high-degree peer pressure.
Recently, I talked with a group that discussed a brilliant option – – Help the child look like peers by reading on an electronic device, but choose books that are at the tween’s reading level.
Hear What Others Are Seeing
This is another electronic solution to boost reading skills, but to fit in with the peers. Grab a pair of ear buds, an audio book, and a hard copy of the same text. It is oh-so-cool to listen to something electronically. Why not choose the harder, popular book, but support the reader by allowing him to listen to it.
Seek Low Text – High Meaning Books
Beginning readers need a high text-picture connection. The visuals help the reader understand the words on the page. Older, struggling readers, often benefit from the same support of pictures or diagrams while they read. And that format . . . is so popular with readers of all skill levels.
One kind of book with a high connection between text and graphic is the doodle books. The reader gets a lot of information with few words. Then, they are asked to apply that information. My tween devos, Dare U 2 Open This Book and Just Sayin’, are in that category. In fact, the concept for those books came from observing struggling readers get excited about reading books in a similar format. The exciting thing was seeing kids who were average and strong readers getting excited about the same thing. My response? I wanted to create devotional books for tweens that offer a lot of information with few words and then asked them to apply the Biblical principle.
Do you have a struggling or reluctant reader? What kind of books work?
I hope that you and your children will celebrate National Reading Month by curling up with a good book!
Blessings,
Carol