There are kids who love to read and then there are kids who would rather clean their rooms, empty the dishwasher, reorganize the garage, or stare silently at a wall–ANYTHING other than pick up a book.
For many of our students, reading has become a chore—an impossible task that some mysterious group of people apparently does for fun. Whatever the reason holding a student back, I am fond of saying that nobody hates to read; we just have to find the thing they love to read about.
The problem is that school has a habit of changing the flavor of the purpose of reading.
Students increasingly read because they have to. They read textbooks, assignments, directions, test passages, primary sources and research. Reading becomes something followed by questions, something graded, something timed, something measured.
That work is important. However, at home we have an opportunity to protect another purpose for reading—arguably an even more important one:
I read because I want to know something.
I read because it is interesting.
I read because I love a good story.
This is particularly important for students who receive special education support. Difficulty with reading shouldn’t mean that virtually every encounter with text becomes practice, intervention or assessment.
Reading doesn’t always have to be a job.
Sometimes it should be as interesting as a conversation with a good friend, as exciting as a playoff game, or as informative as their best teacher.
Research supports the importance of getting kids to this point. Reading enjoyment, motivation and engagement are associated with reading achievement, and students who enjoy reading are more likely to actually do it. That creates something wonderfully uncomplicated: more opportunities to become better readers.
So how do we get them there?
Here are five places to start.
1. Let Them Read What They Actually Like
We need to broaden our definition of “worthwhile” reading.
A child who doesn’t want the novel we put in front of them may happily spend forty-five minutes reading about the Knicks, World War II, Taylor Swift, Minecraft, cars, sharks or the history of sneakers.
That’s reading.
So are:
- graphic novels and manga
- sports articles
- biographies
- fantasy and science fiction
- magazines
- cookbooks
- gaming guides
- online articles
- books about fashion, animals, celebrities, science or history
- audiobooks paired with print or ebooks
Our mission is to find the doorway into reading, not dictate which doorway is right and which one is unacceptable.
This also means that recreational reading doesn’t always need to be restricted to a student’s assessed reading level. Reading levels can be extraordinarily useful instructional tools, but they don’t need to become fences around a child’s curiosity.
A student may struggle to independently decode a book about ancient Rome while being completely fascinated by ancient Rome. An audiobook, graphic novel or accessible article can allow that student to participate in ideas that match their intellectual interests even when the mechanics of reading are difficult.
Choice matters. Interest matters. Accessibility matters.
Research on reading motivation repeatedly points toward choice, relevance, competence and autonomy as important ingredients.
If the goal is to create a reader, sometimes the best place to begin is simply asking:
“What do you actually want to know about?”
2. Not Every Book Needs a Quiz
Parents naturally want to know whether their child understood what they read.
Teachers do too. It’s practically an occupational hazard.
So we ask:
“What was the main idea?”
“Who were the characters?”
“What happened in Chapter 4?”
Those are perfectly reasonable questions in the right context. The problem comes when every reading experience starts to feel like someone is waiting around the corner with a comprehension assessment.
Imagine if every time you finished watching something on Netflix, someone appeared with a clipboard and asked you to identify the central conflict and provide three pieces of supporting evidence.
You might stop watching Netflix.
Recreational reading needs room to be recreational.
Instead, try the kinds of questions real readers ask each other:
“Anything interesting happen?”
“Is it actually good?”
“Would I like it?”
“Tell me something you learned.”
Or—and this one can be difficult—
don’t ask anything at all.
Let them read.
Intrinsic motivation, perceived competence, value and engagement all matter to adolescent reading. There absolutely remains a place for comprehension questions, written responses and careful analysis, particularly with assigned reading.
But there is a balance to find.
Sometimes a book can just be a book.
3. Help Them Find Their Rabbit Hole
One of the most powerful ways into reading is curiosity.
Kids are remarkably good at becoming experts in things adults never assigned them. Give a sufficiently interested twelve-year-old enough time and internet access and they may suddenly know the complete history of an NBA franchise, every variation of a Marvel character, the engineering specifications of the Titanic or enough obscure facts about sharks to make you reconsider going into the ocean.
Use that.
Help them go down the rabbit hole.
Research-based approaches such as Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction deliberately connect reading with curiosity, interesting content, knowledge goals, choice and multiple kinds of texts.
At home, it might look something like this:
Titanic → article → documentary → survivor account → historical fiction → nonfiction book
Basketball → statistics → player biography → sports journalism → book
Marvel → comics → character history → mythology → graphic novel → novel
Notice that the pathway doesn’t necessarily begin with a traditional book.
That’s okay.
We aren’t trying to manufacture the appearance of reading. We’re trying to build the habits of a curious person.
One source leads to another. One question produces three more questions. An article leads to a video, which leads to a biography, which leads to a book that a child never would have touched if we had simply handed it to them and said, “You need to read twenty minutes tonight.”
Don’t worry too much about whether the first stop looks sufficiently “academic.”
Follow curiosity.
Let them become curiouser and curiouser until they find their Wonderland at the bottom of the rabbit hole.
4. Make Reading Social
We have a strange stereotype of “the reader.”
The bookworm.
Alone in the library. Not playing at recess. Perhaps cloistered under a tree while everyone else explores the world.
Personally, I love to read. I’ve also fallen out of many trees, and recess was probably my best subject in middle school—perhaps second only to Lunch.
Reading doesn’t have to be solitary.
In fact, making reading social can be particularly powerful for struggling readers because it transforms reading from an individual performance into a shared experience.
Families can:
- listen to an audiobook together in the car
- read the same graphic novel
- recommend articles to one another
- visit the library or bookstore together
- talk about books over dinner
- watch the movie after reading the book
- text their child an interesting article
- let siblings recommend books
- ask a librarian for recommendations based on a child’s interests
Research with struggling middle school readers has found that relationships with other people can influence students’ motivation to obtain and read books. Other research similarly points toward the importance of support from parents and peers.
This doesn’t mean creating mandatory Berman Family Book Club meetings every Thursday at 7:00 complete with agendas and discussion questions.
It can be much simpler.
“I saw this and thought you’d like it.”
That’s enough.
Because now reading isn’t something adults are making a child do.
It’s something people share.
5. Make It Safe to Be a Reader
For families of students receiving special education services, this may be the most important practice.
Imagine struggling with something all day at school and then being told you need to do more of it at home.
Imagine that every mistake gets corrected.
Imagine watching a sibling breeze through something that takes you three times as long.
Eventually, even something interesting can start to feel like a place where you aren’t successful.
Motivation research identifies perceived competence alongside autonomy and relationships as important conditions supporting motivation. Appropriate texts, useful strategies and supportive feedback can help students experience themselves as capable readers.
So recreational reading should not become another place to fail.
Try to avoid:
- comparing siblings’ reading levels
- constantly correcting oral reading
- requiring every book to be finished
- treating easier books as “baby books”
- removing graphic novels because they aren’t “real reading”
- using reading as punishment
- requiring a written response after every recreational reading experience
Instead, give children permission to behave like actual adult readers.
They can dislike books.
They can quit books.
They can reread books.
They can choose something easy.
They can choose something ridiculous.
They can read the same author twelve times.
They can decide fifty pages into a book that it simply isn’t for them.
“Didn’t like it? It happens to me all the time. Let’s find another one.”
That isn’t giving up on reading.
That’s teaching them how readers actually read.
Our Goal Is a Reader Who Doesn’t Need Us
School can teach students decoding, comprehension, vocabulary, analysis and research. Teachers can provide intervention, explicit instruction, accommodations and carefully selected texts.
All of those things matter.
But ultimately, we want something deeper than a student who successfully completes reading assignments.
We want a reader.
We want a young person who knows that when they are curious, confused, fascinated, bored, inspired or simply looking for a good story, reading is one of the things they can choose to do.
For students receiving special education services, developing that identity can be especially powerful.
Reading should not belong exclusively to intervention periods, assessments and ELA classrooms.
It belongs on the couch.
It belongs on airplanes and in the backseat of the car.
It belongs at the beach, on the subway, in a waiting room, on a phone, through headphones and underneath the blankets when they were definitely supposed to be asleep twenty minutes ago.
Reading belongs with the fun and meaningful parts of life.
If we want children to become lifelong readers, perhaps that’s where we need to put it back.
Research & Resources for Families
Guthrie, J. T., Klauda, S. L., & Ho, A. N. (2013). Modeling the relationships among reading instruction, motivation, engagement, and achievement for adolescents. Reading Research Quarterly, 48(1), 9–26. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.035
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. (2011). Do students today read for pleasure? PISA in Focus, 8, 1–4. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/5k9h362lhw32-en
van der Sande, L., van Steensel, R., Fikrat-Wevers, S., & Arends, L. (2023). Effectiveness of interventions that foster reading motivation: A meta-analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 35, Article 21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-023-09719-3
Wigfield, A., Gladstone, J. R., & Turci, L. (2016). Beyond cognition: Reading motivation and reading comprehension. Child Development Perspectives, 10(3), 190–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12184