There are many opportunities for children to read. When travelling in the car encourage your children to look for objects around them that have the first letter of their name in them. Encourage recognition of words on buildings, hoardings and posters. Ask children what the road signs say and mean. There are endless opportunities all around.

Read, read, read. I can’t stress this enough. As an educator encourage students to choose books for your to read to them. Have a list of favourite books where children can vote on the one they like the best, encourage students to bring books from home. Talk about books, use different voices for the different characters and generally be enthusiastic.

When children learn to read it opens up a whole new world to them.

So how do we encourage children to want to read?  Reading to a child even before birth will encourage children to want to hear more. So read to them every day. Make a special time that is just for reading. It doesn’t matter how busy you are, by doing this you are preparing your child’s future.

Christmas is over and it’s time to start thinking about a new school year. How will you motivate your students to want to read? Think about it, many students are keen to get back to school and want to learn about many things, but there are some students who are not so keen or interested. Why? What can teachers do about it?

My advice is to learn about your students. Find out as much background information as you can and use that to initiate conversation. It’s interesting what you can learn about students if you take a little time to talk to them. Try talking to individual students while doing yard duty, before and after school or when you have a spare moment. Use the information to create interesting and relevant lessons.