Today we're welcoming a special guest to the blog: Tui T. Sutherland! Not only is Tui the New York Times bestselling author of Wings of Fire, she also contributed an original short story to the Scholastic Summer Reading Challenge, our free online reading program for kids.
Check out Tui's five tips to get kids excited about reading all summer long.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to get kids excited about reading. Two kids in particular—my own little boys! They are now three and five years old, and pretty much my entire mission in life is to turn them into enthusiastic, happy readers. Typically, I’m just flying by my inner bookworm instincts, but here’s what we do:
Fill the house with books.
It’s driving my husband crazy, but there are books in every room and on every surface—so it’s easy to reach for one any moment you’re resting or bored, and they feel like a natural part of our lives.
Go to the library at least once a week.
We often go for storytimes or sing-alongs, but mostly we go to pick out books. I usually don’t set a limit (because I know I can’t stick to it myself!). It’s a wonderful hour of choosing new books and finding things we’re excited about—the three-year-old knows where the Halloween section is, and the five-year-old goes straight for graphic novels and anything with a superhero on the cover. Then we come home and spread the books all over the living room and organize them into piles and read them all together.
Read together every night.
I usually read something with both of them (tonight we did a Fancy Nancy book and a chapter of a Tashi book), then at least one book with each of them individually (or a chapter with the five-year-old, who loves Roald Dahl, Magic Tree House, and Zita the Spacegirl).
Play word games.
Simple ones, like rhyming games in the car, or more complicated ones—for example, I’ll put labels on things around the house (“boot”, “truck,” “bed”) and then we have a word treasure hunt, where they try to find the labels, then bring them back and read them to me for prizes (like mini-marshmallows).
Talk about the characters you’ve been reading about.
Often we’ll play pretend, with each of us as a character in a story, or we’ll tell each other new stories about them. They especially love the ones where characters from different stories run into each other—how would Nate the Great get along with Scooby-Doo’s gang, or what would Bink and Gollie think of Lulu and her brontosaurus?
Until the end of June, you can read the first book in the Wings of Fire series, The Dragonet Prophecy, completely free as well as read never-before-seen annotated notes from author Tui T. Sutherland. Power up and read this summer with Wings of Fire!
