How do you get reluctant readers to read?

[SeeKnievelHitThe17thBus]

We have an 8 year old who, whilst he loves being read to, has no interest in reading himself at all. Both his parents read and he's been read to since birth, but he struggled with reading and phonics at school, never had any interest in the "incidental" reading that other kids seemed to do - road signs, shop names etc. and even now, trying outright bribery of "you get to go to the cinema / McDonalds if you read this book" isn't encouraging him to read. He read more with DH over half term and got his cinema / McDonalds trip, but hasn't read anything since without being asked to sit down and read.

He has picture books, chapter books, recipe books, comics, non-fiction, reference books, grown up books on topics e.g. Charles Darwin, trains etc. but he just has no interest in reading. Even getting him to reduce the amount of TV he watched has just resulted in him running around in the living room more.

I just get so sick of seeing all the "World Book Day" spiel on twitter with parents of 6 year olds who apparently read chapter books with ease and his school doing a presentation for parents on how "you set a child up to fail if they fail to read".

How the hell do you get them to read? I was always an avid reader so have no concept of how to engage with him when he's so different to me and I'm concerned he's going to struggle with Sats and secondary school if he can't crack this now.

If there are no underlying issues, I think it's all about persistence. Lots of different books to choose from, kindles, comics etc and patience. I wouldn't put any pressure on it or force him.

My DH is dyslexic and wasn't diagnosed until he was 15. He didn't read as a child or teen but is a massive reader now. Don't give up hope!

I'm passionate about reading - but actually when you look round at adults, most don't read for pleasure as they are too busy.

I think if a child finds reading a bit hard, spends a lot of time doing literacy at school then they aren't going to necessarily think ' ooh what a pleasurable activity' and they are going to pick other stuff over reading. We don't all sit at home doing extra maths in the evening.

I would probably just concentrate of reading brilliant stories to him and going to the theatre (if you can afford it!) and it will gradually come. And audio books are great in the car.

My eldest didn't like reading until he could do it in about year 5. Then he is really specific about the books he likes (alex rider, diary of a wimpy kid and harry potter). He started by reading books we'd already enjoyed at bedtime.

DS1 struggled to get in to reading himself. The issue was that the kinds of stories he was interested in were too challenging/too much hard work for him to read himself. (He’s finally been identified as dyslexic at 17).

When he was 7/8ish I got an audible subscription for him and he spent hours and hours listening to audiobooks. Once his reading ability caught up with what he was interested in reading, he started reading for himself (and still enjoyed listening to audiobooks). His Y6 teacher said he was a joy to take on school trips to the library because he’d recommend books to other children and persuade them to read more.

He doesn’t read as much now as he used to. I think the stuff he wAs made to read for GCSE English has had a horrible effect on his view of reading.

DS2 (who is a reading fan, and has none of his brother’s issues with it) gets The Phoenix comic delivered each week. He is always excited about it arriving in the post and he loves the stuff in it. It’s got lots of short, funny, silly stuff of the kind 8 year olds enjoy.

They do a deal where you get 4 issues for £1 so you can try it and see if he likes it.

When you are reading to him, instead of alternate chapters/ paras, could you get him to "do the voices"? My kids love doing this to show off silly voices.
Would he be interested in a current affairs newspaper like First News? Novelty factor as it comes weekly and includes sports news etc and plenty of pictures.

Ds was a reluctant reader. We had to persevere through until the start of Y2 when he started to get it. It was too much effort for it to be fun. Now he is reading Captain Underpants in bed to himself and enjoying it.

One of mine used to watch tv shows on Netflix and I think the iPlayer with the subtitles on, they read and watched, then became more interested in reading the book of the tv show and it snowballed from there - might be worth a shot?

Thank you everyone. DS' teacher thinks he's a bit behind but not a huge amount, but he seems to hit words he doesn't know and refuses to try and decode them. He just sits there and demands you tell him what the word says even though, to me, the word is easy to decode, just 7 or more characters long.

Thanks for the recommendations so far. We had the Phoenix comic for 6 months, but he never read it himself, and First News is too advanced for him. I had a book from the library for parents with kids who won't read that stuggested books aimed at X age with vocab aimed at a slightly lower level, so we've tried things like Boffin Boy which was aimed at his age with easier vocab. Again, we read to him, he doesn't read.

We gave up on reading Harry Potter to him as it just wasn't his thing.

WellTidy how has your son managed in SATS? DS is a summer baby so if he still hasn't "got" reading by the middle of Year 6 he's stuffed. His Year 2 SATS were a joke and I know he can write sentences much more fluently than his writing and reading allows.

We have some DS / phone games that require an element of reading - he just skips the text off the screen and then has no idea what to do as he hasn't read it. He just hands the device over to ask me what it says.

I'm concerned about those posters whose children were only diagnoses with SENs as teenagers / at university. I work in this sort of environment and you get so angrythat these students had to struggle through 12 years of school that other kids got to cruise through. I don't want that for DS, it shouldn't be this much of a struggle for him.

I don't know what to do about audio books. With all the will in the world, they aren't helping him to read, just to enjoy books. I don't know if that's enough in our school system.

If it is a struggle, then he just won't want to read. But he will be 'reading' everything else. He'll be fed up enough with school books, so don't force extra on him at home. My DS has mild dyslexia, and i found him getting frustrated at this age as his friends moved onto the chapter books, Potter etc etc, but he just couldn't face sitting down and reading a chapter, even with the How to Train A Dragon pictures added in. But he wanted us to read them to him. However, he looked at non fiction books a lot, so get him to read about things that interest him. Several years on, he will still not choose a fiction chapter book to read. We have just accepted that he does not want to read fiction - just because an idealised picture of a perfect pupil is that of a kid devouring Harry Potter, it doesnt mean it is the norm. School had to accept -after a fight- that his free reading was non fiction. After all, many adults don't read fiction.

See Ds' school (small independent) doesn't do SATS so he isn't affected in this way. He has never sat a test with an external indicator of how he is doing. As a result, his progress/lack of has been really disguised.

I have also given up on DS reading aloud to me. I struggled with this decision, as it meant that his mistakes would never be corrected and that doesn't sit right with me given his difficulties. But he enjoys reading more now that he is not 'performing'. I was also aware that nobody else in his class read aloud at home anymore. As I said, that decision doesn't sit well with me as the other children in his class are better readers. But it has helped DS enjoy books more on his own.

This thread has me nodding my head.

I love my daughter. She is not good at reading, and trying to get her to read is like pulling teeth. It's sad and frustrating and worrying to watch.

Asking her to do silent reading wouldn't work. She just look at the pictures, because she basically doesn't want to do things that take effort.

Even when she reads out loud to me, I have to stand over her and watch, otherwise she will just make up her own sentences rather than reading. It's the sneakiness and laziness that upsets me.

I wish there was a way to get her to see how unhappy it is making me.

"We have some DS / phone games that require an element of reading"

Those texts are tiny. Try the PC ones. Prodigy has sound with text, but poptropica hasn't. It's a problem solving game, you have to keep talking to people to find clues, and really fun. Your ds may get into it.
Also if he likes watching tv, watch it with subtitles. Without realizing, they are actually looking at words when spoken. That's how my ds learned to read before school. By the time I realised he can read, he was already fluent reader.

Could it be a vision/ perceptual issue? Dd hasn't got dyslexia because she can do phonics (did he pass the yr1 phonics screening?). She could sound out words and was doing ok lower in the school when the letters were bigger - not great, but ok. The smaller the font the harder it is to read. She gets visual distortions on the page so the letters move and white paper is too bright and glares. She has other issues too - she dislikes sunlight and fluorescent lights, her co-ordination is affected, she gets travel sick. In maths when copying she will swap digits around. She has found that colour filters, coloured paper and Irlens glasses have really helped her.

Thanks everyone. DS always asks for the subtitles to be taken off the TV as he finds them a distraction, so it's interesting what you say about them being incidentally read. He does have glasses, but doesn't always need to wear them. Shouldwestay your DD sounds like my son - he's also travel sick and transposes. The coloured filters etc. would require effort from the SENCO but it's something we can raise at the optician but he's apparently not old enough for an optician test.

He was interested in the badly edited free Pokemon book on my kindle, last night, so I might put him a better book onto it for him to have a go at. I'll also have a look at Poptropica to see if it's something he might be interested in.

I can see that most children don't like subs on TV. Mine was used to it since he was a baby because I am a foreigner and always watched with it, and wanted to have it on his cartoon too.

I think you can buy coloured filter ruler overlay type things on Amazon?

Would he read something like the Beano?

I was just coming on to say beano.
Ds1 doesn’t like reading.
He can do it he just doesn’t like it.
However he loves cooking so we read recipe books then cook something he has chosen.
His beano subscription has just stopped after 5 years ( he is 13!)

Every now and then he finds a book series he loves and reads on his own but mostly not.

Be gentle with him. 👍

I stopped trying and now at 14 he devours anything about Einstein and Elon Musk. I realise it’s about learning and being inspired, howsoever that’s achieved

My 10 year old is the same, and it worries me. She missed a lot of school as a result of illness between ages 7-9 and reading didn’t really ‘click’ till last year. She has had extra help and can read fairly fluently now but just won’t read anything for pleasure. I’ve just had to accept that. I do still read to her at bedtime, just to try and broaden her vocabulary.

You can buy a selection of overlays online, or a cheapskate version would be to take a book into wh smiths and see whether any of them help, or go to the library and look at non-fiction books which often have coloured backgrounds. You can also try changing the background on a computer to see which is easier here. Once you know the preferred overlay colour then use that for a month or two to see if it helps. Unfortunately after that it gets expensive as the lenses are only available privately (see website above). If your ds already wears glasses then the tint can be added to them (as long as they don't have a glazing), but they have to be sent to USA. They have made a big difference to dd though. You could also get him to look at this you tube clip - the distortions are exagerated but it might help him to identify whether he gets any of them.

We taught our second child to read by stealth. We now know he's autistic; back then we just knew he hated reading out loud and couldn't cope with being wrong. Granted this was at a younger age so might not work for you. Basically we read to him and asked him only to give some very minimal help. For example he would have to point at the words while I read them, or he only had to read the main character's name or just the "the"s or "a"s, and I did the rest. To do his bit he had to be watching the text really closely and associating it with what I was saying, so he learned loads without really having to say much, and avoiding all the failure and flashpoints. He thought he was getting away with doing virtually no reading. I'm sure it wouldn't work with every child, some need more feedback, but it suited DS.

We gradually worked up to him doing the first few words on each page, to every other sentence etc.

The subtitles thing is a good idea. My daughter loves the Japanese films by Studio Ghibli. We recorded one off TV for her not realising it was the Japanese with English subtitles version rather than the dubbed one. But she was quite happy to watch it and seemed to be following the plot and watched the film several times. She was only about age 4!!