The Most Important Part of Teaching Kids to Read

Summary: A whole lot of us get this completely and utterly wrong. Schools do it. Teachers do it. Moms do it. Well-meaning adults make an epic mistake in the education of our children: we make teaching a child to read our top priority. When it comes to our kids and books, our top priority is not to teach our children to read. It’s not to help them decode words on a page, learn their phonics, or bolster their reading comprehension. It’s none of those things. This post is a bonus episode of the Read-Aloud Revival podcast. If you'd rather listen, click the play button below. Mark Twain says “a man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read,” and the same thing can be said for children. Our first and foremost job in the education of our children, then, is to nurture a love for reading. We can pretty much shelf everything else until we’re nailing that. Here's why If you focus primarily on teaching your kids HOW to read, you will likely have kids who do, indeed, know how to read. But do you want kids who read because they can? Or kids who read because they love to? Kids who read because they can’t imagine life without stories? A child who has been bribed, cajoled, or pressured to read does not delight in it. When he’s forced to read a book and answer comprehension questions about it, take a quiz on it, or write a book report about it... he learns something very, very clearly: He learns that reading is something you have to do for school. Reading is something you need to get out of the way. Check it off your list. Get it done with, already. So even if he can read, because someone has taught him, he won’t do it for fun. He won’t delight in it. He won’t see books as one of life’s sweetest delights. When you focus on nurturing your child’s love of stories first and foremost, you get a child who can read, and a child who loves to read. You get both You may not get the first part on your timetable, but you’ll get it on your child’s unique timetable, and he’ll have an insatiable appetite for stories, as well, which is worth its weight in gold. A child with an insatiable appetite for stories will learn to read (although that may not happen this week… be patient), but he or she will learn to read. And he or she WILL read, then, even if it doesn’t come as a mandate from mom or the teacher. Especially because it doesn’t. When it comes to the language arts, everything follows nurturing that initial love. First, we want kids who LOVE stories. Everything else- phonics, comprehension, analysis, even writing… follows that. A great loss I find it terribly tragic when I hear that a child has been reading excellent books in school- the best classics, poets, and novelists of all time— if that child doesn’t also leave school with an overpowering love of books. That love is the greater need. Prioritize your child’s love of literature above everything else- even if it means your kids aren’t reading the same impressive books your friends’ kids are, or even if it means they read less, and have less to show for it. In his 1965 anthology, A Father Reads to His Children, Orville Prescott said, “Few children learn to love books by themselves, Someone has to lure them into the wonderful written word; someone has to lead the way.” So how do we do that?

The Most Important Part of Teaching Kids to Read

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