Cultivate a Love of Reading in your Children

Thanks to Children’s Mercy for sponsoring this post. All opinions are my own.

Reading to my kids has always been one of my favorite activities. Of course, when I only had one child it was really easy to do. My daughter and I were home together all day so we could read books and play together. As more children entered our family things got a little more busy, but it also meant I had reading helpers.

Though I like to read with my toddler, so do his siblings. One of my middle child’s favorite activities is reading to his little brother every night before bed. He loves to pick out several books and sit in front of his crib reading the stories and showing him the pictures. It’s funny because he likes to read him the stories more than his little brother likes to listen to the stories.

I feel it is important to introduce learning into play when kids are young. Simple things like singing the ABC’s when changing my baby’s diaper, or counting fingers and toes are ways to bring in education when they are young without it being invasive.

“Research shows that 15 to 20 percent of all children will experience difficulty in learning to read.” I hope that my efforts in reading to my children from the beginning will help start them off on the right foot. I also hope it will cultivate a love of reading as stories as they grow.

The internet is a fantastic source of fun ways to include learning into play. The easiest (in my opinion) and my favorite way is through games. We have a lot of folder games that all of my children, as preschoolers, have loved to play with. These folder games teach colors, patterns, matching, counting, rhyming and so on.

If you have a preschooler that you are helping teach the letters and their sounds to prepare them to read here is a fun game I have prepared for you. Simply download and print these letter pages. Cut out each letter to make the matching game. The game is to match capital and lowercase letters. It’s a fun way to play with your child and teach them their letters and the difference between lowercase and capital letters. You can play the game several ways: use the rules to go fish and ask for the letters you need, play memory and turn the letters facing down then try to match them by flipping over two at a time, play “52 card pick up” and spread them all over the floor picking up matches as you go. You can also make it a folder game by gluing one set of letters in a folder (I would recommend the lowercase letters since several of them can be turned to look the same: b,d,p,q) put a little piece of Velcro or magnet on each letter and then the other set of letters can be stuck onto the right match.

For even more resources to encourage children to read Children’s Mercy has a fantastic . Get all the details at that link.

Now that my first child has grown she loves to read and volunteers to sit and read almost everyday. My 6 year old likes to read if it is a topic he is interested in, so my job now has been to make sure I have plenty of books on hand of interesting topics. My toddler enjoys being read to by everyone and so I hope he too is learning to love books, stories and eventually reading when he is able. Until that time, we’ll enjoy playing letter games together.

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