Do you want to know how to teach your kids to love reading? I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach parenting
as well as education all over the world. I'm mostly known for teaching self-government
but in this video, I'm going to be talking about teaching your children to love reading.
In this video I'm going to be talking about what not to do so that your children will love reading
but also what you can do and some of these ideas might be more simple than you thought.
I've taught many people to read and I promise you I know what I'm talking about. Years ago, I started
teaching my oldest son to read. He was three years old and he was definitely interested and he was
ready so I decided okay, I'll teach him to read. I actually went to a training by a woman named
Lynn Hanson and she has a method called the Lynn Hanson reading method. I used this method, her cute
little songs and a few of her charts and I was able to teach my son to read in 40 minutes. This
was amazing. Now, how did my three-year-old want to learn to read anyway? Why did he want to spend
time doing that? Well our family culture was a big piece of that. So in our family culture, we did not
spend time watching tv. We spent time reading to him so that was his very favorite activity.
In fact we maintained that for all of our children so all of our children around age three started
asking to read. Now, not all of them had it come as easily as others. Two of my children were able to
read very quickly, two of my children were dyslexic and had to struggle at it for quite some time
but they ended up becoming really good readers in the end. So, even though a person is interested in
reading doesn't mean that they're all going to progress at the same level. An interesting thing
happened after I taught my oldest son to read and then my oldest daughter to read, people, sometimes
even school teachers were asking me hey, Nicholeen, can you help me teach my daughter to read so that
she's ready for school and I said okay, sure. Bring her over. We got 40 minutes, I can get you
started and they were absolutely amazed that it could be done that easily but the thing is is
sometimes after you teach a person to read, they don't actually want to practice reading and they
start feeling like reading is hard and maybe they would rather start doing something else. So, before
I ever taught my child to read, I actually had them make a commitment to me that they would spend at
least 15 minutes a day with me reading if we went through the trouble of teaching them how. Well they
were so excited to learn how they said yes, I will do 15 minutes a day. So, that was my commitment and
we followed through on that for a long time but it didn't take much time for them to be off reading
on their own all the time. Why? Why did that happen? Well there are some key things that you might want
to know so that your children will go off and just read by themselves too. Before I talk about some
of these ways that you can help your child learn to love reading, click on the subscribe button. Do
you enjoy this type of video? Well there are many of them. They come out every single day on this
channel and you're not going to want to miss the other content that I have related to education
as well as parenting communication and child development. The teaching self-government channel
is all here for you so that your home culture and relationships thrive. Click on the subscribe
button now. So, let's talk about a few things not to do. Don't trick your children,
don't bribe your children. A lot of people will try to trick them into reading so that the child
doesn't know that they're reading. No, they need to know and they need to know that they have
to practice it because they'll never deliberately decide to do it on their own if they don't
really know how it even happened especially when they get to harder reading material and they have
to push past it. They won't know it's even possible if you tricked them into it. So that's important.
Also bribing is not good because then they're not really reading for the sake of reading. They're
reading because they're going to get something else out of it. The reading is its own reward. They
may not recognize it at first but if they see the beauty of the stories, if they can discuss with you
important things, if they have something to talk about with grandma and grandpa that's intelligent
and fun, that is its own reward. Now. that gives you some things right there that you can do to help a
person love reading. So, number one, discuss whatever you read with your children. So, read to them
on a daily basis even though my youngest son is 17, almost 18, he literally is doing college classes.
I still read out loud to him every day. Right now we're reading the Count of Monte Cristo and it's
a lot of fun. We spend time discussing this story together and thinking about that time period and
everything else and it's a bonding time for us. If your child bonds during reading time, guess
what? They love reading and they love learning so that bond is important, that relationship with you
brings another relationship to the books. Also pick good stuff. Some of the twaddle things, they
just aren't very great, right? It's just like okay I'm gonna read about so and so learning how to
make a pancake, what is that, that's nothing, right? Instead what we need to come up with is something
that comes back to a core value, something that's right or wrong, good or bad, true or false
then it's relevant material. Even if it's a simple story like a simplified version of Little Women
or something like that that your child might be reading, it's still going to come back to
self-government, caring in the family, good family connection and bonds, love and grief, these things
are important to children. It's relevant to their life. So picking good things, classical things makes
a big difference too. Also make sure that you don't watch tons and tons of tv, I already mentioned that
before but that's a big one. If you're watching too much television and having too much digital
stimulation, they're just going to stop craving the books because it's harder to read the books
than just sit there and be entertained by a screen. I mentioned discussion before discussion is huge.
So, don't just discuss as a family but if you can create a discussion group with other peers.
When I first started homeschooling my children which I chose to do because they were such early
readers and I didn't want them to be bored at school, we ended up becoming part of a family
discussion group. And so the families would read books each month and we would get together once a
month and discuss that reading. It was so much fun and our children saw I can talk about these books
and these great ideas with all of my friends. The children would sit and discuss world events and
time periods in history and great leaders, things that you don't usually hear children discuss. Why?
Because they're not exposed to them. Why? Because they don't know how to discuss. Learning to discuss
leads a person to crave more learning. They see the value of it so don't just read fictional
stories but read biographies and other accounts of history. If you want to read about the holocaust,
read the hiding place. It's way better than the Diary of Anne Frank even though that one's okay
but there are so many really live things that are true that help people know not only a time period
of history but a person and can make that time period come alive once they learn more than other
people their age, they want more and more and more of it. Reading truly is a food for the mind and for
the soul if you pick the right content. As part of my teaching self-government parenting course,
I talk about having certain meetings with children and we have in our house we have the couples
meeting, the family meeting which we have with the whole group but then we also have the individual
mentor meetings. These mentor meetings is where we would get together with our children
and we would help them set goals or we would make commitments for things that they wanted to
accomplish with their academics their social life their family relationships and so forth. So, these
meetings are huge. If you learn how to conduct a really great mentor meeting and ask the right
kinds of questions to your child, it helps them take ownership over their own education. Setting
goals for reading is powerful and you can attach positive consequences to those goals. I would
definitely not attach any negative consequences to a reading goal until a person is like after
the age of 12 or 13. They should definitely be looking at the good side of reading all of
the time. Now of course sometimes you might give a child an instruction to do their reading and they
don't and they need to be corrected for that, make sure you're correcting things in a non-emotional
way so that you're not attaching negative emotion to that reading time. They need to see it as a good
thing, something you're pointing them toward and maybe even will correct them about but definitely,
you're not going to get emotional about it because you know they're going to love it and you can
trust in that, right? So, a good parent is one that doesn't stress out or force but instead trusts
in the learning process. Trust in the development of the child that it's going to happen over time,
that's one thing I learned as a homeschooler. I've now taught many people in my home school community
and my town how to read as well as my own children and one thing that I can tell you is that if you
teach them how to read in a way that encourages loving the reading and that goes a long, long way
but then afterward, if you make sure that you love reading, that you talk to them about the things
you're reading as well as read to them and talk to them about those things and encourage them to
talk to other people in your community about what they're reading too, they're probably never going
to want to stop reading and that's a pretty good thing, right? If you've enjoyed this video all about
learning to love reading then I know that you're going to love my next video which is called the
not so known secret for parenting success. It will go into more details about the skills you might
need to use to help your children be able to excel. It will also talk some about the meetings and the
culture that you want to establish in your home so that you can teach your children self-mastery. Not
just over their academics but over their behavior and they can invest in their relationships
and bond more closely to you as a family as well. So, click on the link to that video now.