How do you encourage a reluctant reader?

[ZucchiniPie]

DD is 5 and a quarter and has just started in Year 1. In Reception she learned her phonics fine but was pretty reluctant to do any reading. Now she's back at school she seems to have forgotten everything (understandable after a six week break - we didn't practice during the holidays) but is really anti the whole idea of reading. She fidgets constantly and looks everywhere but the page. I can't work out whether she is just grumpy about having to do it (we often go days without taking her reading book out of her book-bag so we're certainly not drilling her) or whether she finds it really hard and is avoiding something she finds uncomfortable.

I'm terrified of turning her off the idea of reading even more by pushing her too hard but on the other hand, perhaps she needs a bit of a shove to take it more seriously. Her other verbal skills are excellent and, although I have considered it, I don't think she's dyslexic as she writes quite fluently (albeit phonetically still). Or is 5 and a quarter still really young and I should just let it come naturally - after all she wouldn't have even started reading yet if we lived in Scandinavia :-)

Any good suggestions to encourage positivity without resorting to downright bribery?

I'd suggest you read the book to her. Get her to read odd words (that you know she can do). Build up to getting her to read odd words that are more challenging or longer sentences. Make reading fun, rather than a chore. Remember it is hard work even reading a short sentence when you have to phonically decode every single word!

That's a good idea - thanks.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. She's very young. Reading to her daily will definitely help, get her used to expecting books as part of her daily life, take her to the library at least once a week and let her choose books. Let her look at picture books. It will come, she will get there.

She loves being read to (including chapter books now) so there's no resistance to books, or unfamiliarity with them, at all. She just doesn't want to do it herself! My instincts so far have been to not worry or push her at all, but I did start to wonder whether I'm letting her down by being SO laissez-faire. I think you're right though - she's still really young so no hurry.

Dr Seuss books are great for learning to read.
I got my ds reading with them.
I used to read the easy ones to him every evening.
Then progress to the harder ones as he got older.
They are fun silly books which make kids smile.

Anything is better than biff and chip!

I would hit the library and see if you can find any other easy reader she may like. DD wasn't too keen on ORT, luckily they had no fixed reading scheme so she brought home quite a lot of other books.

We used a lot of the "I read a page, you read a page" system.

We liked the Usborne First Reader ones, fairly easy text, lots of pictures and nice stories.

Let her read aloud to a younger sibling, or teddy.

She could also follow the words of an audio book in a real book.

Second the idea of going to the library and letting her choose books that she wants to read.

What interests her? Is there anything she's really really keen on? My DS1 is the same age and has just started year 1 too; he sort of just ploughs through fiction/ Biff and Chip, but really enjoys anything non-fiction on topics he likes. His last reading book was about Magellan's voyage and he loved it, asked me to look up more info and if he could have a book that's more detailed.
We often go to the library and he picks out stuff he likes (all non-fiction), and he happily reads those at home. He likes that he can gain knowledge from books.
Maybe when your DD understands that books can open a whole new world to her, she'll be keener to learn to read. Just get anything, it doesn't have to be a reading scheme, as long as it's on something she loves!

Buy her an agew appropriate comic - most kids love them and it may encourage her to read

sorry - 'age' not 'agew'

Sorry, had to run off to a meeting - all these suggestions about getting her to read things that interest her are a great idea. It hadn't really occurred to me that the books she gets sent home with from school for reading are almost all dreadful dull things and I don't think she sees the point of them.

Allowing her to choose would be much better. We go to the library all the time and come home laden with books (literally nearly 30 at a time because we use three library cards!) but I've never thought about finding things for her to read, as opposed to have read to her and her little brother.

Dr Seuss is also a brilliant idea as she loves them (without knowing them so well she could recite them off by heart, which is a problem with many of our books!)

Comic a great idea too - she's always angling to be bought them and maybe that could be the deal: she gets one if she reads it herself!

or at least I mean she's willing to try reading it herself...

Agree with reading to her, adding:

Spotting words while out and about (EXIT, PAY HERE, CAR PARK)

shopping lists (if you can cope with exotic foods such as CARTS and BENS)

turn subtitles on when watching CBeebies, especially when on a computer/tablet, as it's so close (incidentally, the CBeebies app includes Alphablocks). Subtitles are partivularly fun with CRASH, BANG, ARGH and other noises! Maybe she'd like to try spelling SPLAT!

Offer her choice of dessert in writing: she's going to be damned careful to choose ICE CREAM and not POO, isn't she?!

I did treasure hunts around the house - DS had to read one clue to get to the next (bath, TV, dog bed etc.) and got a little toy car or some chocolate coins at the end. In terms of reading books, he wasn't interested at all until he got into Minecraft, and then suddenly he was devouring Minecraft guides and annuals.

There's a series of books called Red Nose Readers that are also great for children starting to read for themeselves. They come in 3 different levels but are very humourous and have appealling artwork - reluctant DS loved them!

Treasure hunt and dessert choice, etc. is a brilliant idea!
Will check out Red Nose Readers

My DD1 didn't get off to a flying start with reading. She sort of muddled along till year 3, when it all clicked. We did three things that in retrospect were helpful:

1. We read to her. The stories we read to her were more complicated and more interesting than the ones she could read to herself. So by the time she was able to decode more efficiently, she had lots of experience with following richer narratives.
2. We kept an early bedtime for her. So, even as she got older and wasn't falling asleep as quickly, she still went to bed at 8pm. This meant instead of staying up and watching TV, she was allowed to read until she was ready to turn out her bedside light. My husband and I still had an evening as she got older, and she had built in reading time in her day.
3. We let her read whatever she chose. We are a state school family and the book choices at her school aren't great. So we bought her books off the internet, and had books ordered to the library. If a book didn't grab her attention, we let her stop after chapter 3. If she wanted to read books that we thought were easy; we let her. We have never insisted that she read any book, no matter how "improving" it would be.

She ended year 5 at NCL 5, which for us was good.

Thanks - re point 3 and reading this thread generally, it's made me realise that I just wasn't considering that the books she was coming home with might be part of the problem. I'm not sure her school even has a particular reading scheme - they all seem incredibly random and, as I said above, often very boring.
When we next go to the library I will definitely check out what early readers they have as we've only ever got things I'd read to her and DS, so I don't even know what they have on offer.

All really useful - thanks everyone!

Oh, those books can be tedious - if they have to be read every night (homework) I'd try and keep a distinction between that & the reading you do for enjoyment with her. Relax. As an intelligent girl, she is probably a little frustrated that she can't read as quickly as her mind works - does that make sense?? It takes awhile for everything to catch up, we have learning spurts in different areas, at different times.

It would certainly be worth having a word with the teacher, she / he can help your daughter choose more engaging books.

Paul Jennings, children's author, has some excellent tips on encouraging young readers.

If she fidgets a lot while reading, they aren't grabbing her attention. Try books that she needs to read in order to discover something ie there is a clear purpose for reading. Florentine & Pig picture book series ( should be able to get these from the library) incorporates activities into them - recipes and craft that link to the story. These give purpose to the story, plus you need to read the instructions to complete the task / recipe.

most of the books schools use wouldn't interest many children. PERSONALLY we liked the Songbirds Phonics books by Julia Donaldsdon - big set of them available through the book people at the moment I think for about £15. My 2 liked almost all the books in the set and they are in different levels introducing sounds in a suitable order.

Thank you! The Paul Jennings tips are fantastic and I'll definitely check out Florentine and Pig.

Julia Donaldson phonics books sound like a definite winner

I'm feeling a bit pathetic that I've just been going along with what the school has been doing and never investigated all this before!

OP thank you for starting this thread, I'm reading responses closely - my DD has just started Y2 and 12 months ago could have written your thread. I felt the same as you, that it was worse to force the reading and potentially entrench her further against it.

Throughout Y1 she could read well if she was in the mood, but if she wasn't, her ability was much lower. If she wasn't in the mood we had terrible tantrums, and throwing herself around, if this happened (almost daily) I read to her instead. (TBH I really struggle with all this as I am an avid reader, as is DH - we are a book-loving family and have many books in the house! and read several books a day since birth to our DC and really tried to instil this love in our children).

At the end of Y1, she got lower marks (or whatever the stats are called) for reading than writing/maths, and that gave me a bit of a shock, as the teacher felt she should definitely be doing better, but needed more practice, and asked me if we had books at home/read together regularly

So I decided to change tactics slightly, and now my approach is that practicing reading daily is an obligation, much like eating veg/cleaning teeth. We spent the summer going to the library regularly with DD, letting her choose books she wanted to read from the early reader section (that is where the fabulous Usborne Early Reader series mentioned by previous pp) are found. She responds well to controlling the book choices!

We still get tantrums when I say it's time to read, but much less as it's now a 'non-negotiable' so she gives in pretty easily. I have seen quite a bit of improvement and hope it will continue. I do think I should have adopted this approach a year earlier...

I love the suggestions above and will be using some of the new ideas!

With me there's also a fair dollop of guilt thrown in, as I work four days a week and only get home at 6.45pm, by which time she's usually too tired to do any reading and would much rather be read to (along with DS). Mornings are hopeless because it's always just a mad dash to get everyone ready to leave the house - I guess if we got up half an hour earlier that would be a solution but it just never seems to happen.

So part of the problem is that we haven't built it into our routine, so it gets squeezed in, which adds to the fraughtness.

Perhaps mornings are the best answer - will start setting an earlier alarm!