Mumsnet users share their tips for encouraging their children to love reading with McDonald's

[JustineBMumsnet]

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Reading with your child can be a fun, educational and rewarding experience, but reading may be an activity your child comes to associate with schoolwork rather than fun. With their fifth Happy Readers campaign coming up soon, McDonald's would like to hear about how you encourage your children to love reading.

Here's what McDonald's has to say: "We're committed to helping families enjoy time reading together and believe in the power of stories to ignite children’s amazing imaginations. However it’s not always easy to fit regular reading into busy lives. As we prepare for our 5th Happy Readers campaign, giving away a free book with every Happy Meal, we're keen to get advice from Mumsnetters. Your tips and advice for building a love of reading with your children, inventive ways you manage to build regular story time and reading into your busy lives, and, with the school holidays in full swing, all the ways you encourage, nurture and ignite your children’s imagination. Through reading and beyond."

How do you encourage a love of reading? Do you have tips for building reading into your child's daily routine? How do you ignite your child's imagination while reading with them?

However you encourage a love of reading with your child and using their imagination, share this with McDonald's below to be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will win a £300 voucher for the store of their choice (from a list).

Thanks and good luck!

MNHQ

Insight Terms and Conditions apply

By example, I read all the time, children can learn by copying, and will get the reading bug if they are introduced to reading early on.

My daughter is 5 and she loves reading! She now manages to read most of the tricky words too and can easily read a bedtime story for her little sister. She very rarely uses tablets or watches TV which I think helped a lot with her love to books because she chooses to play, colour or write stories instead.

We don't just read at bedtime we always read a book after lunch to let the lunch go down before play continues!

We go to the local library, and have a competition each summer holidays to see who can read the most books!

I read to them from very soon after birth, always making books a fun treat. Trips to the library were treated as an adventure. Bedtime was always time for us all to snuggle up and read together before they got into their own beds to sleep. I really miss these bedtimes now they're grown-up

I finish reading a book then put it back on the shelf, telling 10 year old DS 'That one's not really appropriate so you probably shouldn't read it" Works every time!

We love visiting the library together

My eldest barely needs encouragement,she just loves books! We did buy some funky Little Miss Sunshine magnetic bookmarks though as a reward for reading so well.

I always read myself and my children want to imitate that. Also we have books everywhere.
My 3 eldest are all voracious readers.
We don't have a tv, we sit with our books instead.

Being seen to read yourself sets an example.

I make sure they see me reading, include books for birthday/Christmas and visit the library as often as we can.

I think the most important thing when it comes to encouraging children to read is making books available to them, no matter what your budget. When we were low on money charity shops and the library were our best friend- she would literally take a suitcase trolly around the shops with her to put all the books she bought in ready to ferry home. Libraries sell withdrawn books for 10p, charity shops aren't that much more expensive so her library grew quickly.

Books exist everywhere in our house and no books are off limits. There are books in the hall, the living room, the kitchen, her bedroom, our bedroom and well... not that bathroom- although we did used to have a cute collection of inflatable bath books once.

I talked to Megan from the day she was born and read out almost everything I was reading to her, I practised phonics with her from the moment she first started making noises and forming words- she learned to read by the time she was one. Not even kidding and people always seem to think that by saying that, that in some way i'm showing off but actually I was desperate to get a jump on her reading because my younger brother grew up not understanding phonics, I had to watch as he spent four years in speech therapy, it wasn't until he was nearly at secondary school that he was diagnosed with dyslexia and he grew up finding the one thing that could have been made easy for him the hardest thing in the world and if my daughter was going to have that trouble, I was going to work as hard as I bloody could to help her.

It turned out that she was different, she found reading so natural and at 5 years old, after many many visits to charity shops, book shops and the library, she challenged herself to read a book every day for a year or until she had read 365 books, she did that in just 10 months and she hasn't slowed down once! Her love of books far exceeds mine, she now reviews books and gets sent books to read because people want her opinion on them and she's started to interview some of her favourite authors and illustrators which is the coolest thing ever! I swear her love harboured from reading to her every night, talking to her all the time, reading with her and those phonics, making it part of our daily routine, going through it when she got up- it worked.

She finds reading fun and she has so many places around our little house where she can snuggle up with a good book, she has free reign over them too so if she fancies reading a picture book she can, if she wants a novella, a novel, a comic, a newspaper she can absolutely do that!

I am lucky that all of my DC love reading, I think that some of it comes from adults introducing DC to reading but it's not as simple as that and some DC just wont enjoy it however hard you try

I bought books before I even had DC, mostly ones that I had enjoyed when I was younger. Bedtime stories started very young though books were not just limited to bedtimes.

I found that books with very little words are great for imagination because you can talk about what's happening in the picture, talk about what you can see, make up alternative stories. It is especially good when DC are younger and not able to read the stories themselves as it makes them a part of it so it grasps their attention more

Don't make it a "thing" that has to be done, make it an everyday occurrence, if the DC see mum and dad reading, they'll want to join in too.

Bedtime stories are a must!!

Now I'm an avid book reader and started reading in-depth newspapers in school like The Times at the age of 7. I love reading for many different reasons but mainly because I like to explore the different ways you can express yourself with the English language. Reading is something I like to instil into my child as her mum and her family are not much of readers and don't really read to her unless it's mandatory like part of some sort of school work or something. Most weekends or holidays when I have her, I like to read a book to her before bed or she chooses one to read to me and it's something we've always done together. She's just completed a reading book challenge with my local library today and was very proud of her achievements, showing off her gold medal. I definitely will continue to encourage her to love reading like I do, but I'm already seeing her love it more as she gets better at grasping the more complex words.

We have been reading to our children from day dot. Babies love to here their parents voice so if you start young they know no different. We enjoy stories together every night and now my daughter is 10 she loves reading on her own and has her own taste like scream street.
We love how you can get an activity book or reading book from McDonald's happy meals for £1. I have never heard of free books will have to have a look out for these. My children get excited about McDonald's toys and books and love the food. My son is autistic and would eat the McDonald's fries all day if I let him.

Books for babies! I sat with them curled up on my lap right from the beginning and read to them. They will develop a natural interest themselves and begin to turn the pages. As they grow they will learn the words you are saying and pick the pictures out in association. I always carried books in my changing bag too for when we stopped anywhere - much better than giving them a phone or tablet which seems to happen so much these days...
Encourage them to make up their own stories from looking at the pictures as they get older.
Books and stories are a magical place in which to escape! Cultivate their imagination!!

Me and my Daughter enjoy walking to the library, it offers a quiet space away from the temptation of technology, we'll often check some books out and take a blanket some snacks and sit in the park, they also have some great reading groups on for kids!

This summer I have taken up reading to my DCs again, after somewhat of a break since they became fluent readers. I am really enjoying the wider vocabularly it is bringing to their experience

A house full of books, regular trips to the library and special treats on holiday. We have just returned from Padstow where one of my children spent all her holiday money in the book shop. She is a proper book worm :)

DS is almost 2. We read every nap time and bedtime, and I have books in our living room on a shelf at his height- he brings then to us during the day.

We live right nect to a beautiful wood, so do lots of imaginative play in there- we were looking for the Gruffalo yesterday. I’ve also made a story sack for reading Elmer- so lots of props we take out at different points of the story. He loves it!

We read together every bed time to encourage an interest in books & keep it fun using books with lift up flaps.

We read in front of them. We sit around on a Saturday morning, just reading books (or looking at them in the case of the two year old). We read every night to them for about half an hour, and we enjoy listening to them tell us stories..

Start them looking at books from a young age. We've been reading to them since we got their Bookstart books, and always joined the local library from a few weeks old. We read to them throughout the day, not just at bedtime, and we bring books on day trips and on holiday to pass the time when travelling.

We have reading hour before bed and it becomes a routine.
I also buy books and comics that are silly and will appeal to my son instead of trying him to read what everyone else is reading currently