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Are you wondering how much time should your child spend reading every day?
Find out how much time your child should spend reading every day besides what they read in school and how easy it is to develop your child’s love of reading. The more reading that a child does, the more quickly they’ll be able to develop as readers.
Nowadays, in this modern age, you’ll find that there are less and less teenagers who really enjoy spending their free time having their nose stuck inside a really good book. With countless distractions easily available, it’s undoubtedly no accident that kids who enjoy reading when they get older are simply the same kids whose parents cultivated and developed a genuine love of reading in them from a very young age.
Before taking a look at how much time a young child should really spend reading, it is essential to discover why reading is so vital for kids.
Reading helps your child acquire a wide range of basic fundamental literacy skills. At a very young age, it will help children recognize letters and sounds, and subsequently they’ll be able to put them together in order to make words. As a result of this, their vocabulary will expand. The more regularly a child reads, the faster their vocabulary will increase. They understand how to use their words and therefore will be motivated to sound out their words on their own.
Also, they’ll be prompted to actually learn new words simply because they will encounter phrases and words that they still have not been exposed to as of yet. In turn, this lets children improve their reading comprehension.
Reading comprehension in short is the skill and ability to understand just what is being said. This is definitely a really important skill in terms of doing well and showing good results at school and on exams. This skill is actually one of the things that many adults struggle with.
So keeping that in mind, just how much should your child read each day? We should disregard the reading that your child has done during school hours, and concentrate on reading that is being done away from their school.
Nowadays, parents are really encouraged to keep up with a home reading schedule that is based on their specific school grade. You should begin with 10 minutes of extra reading in grade one, and you simply add 10 minutes for each subsequent grade up to the sixth grade. Sticking to this example, a fourth grader could well be asked to read for forty minutes each day.
For many parents, this doesn’t sound very practical. Trying to get a ten year old boy to read for 40 minutes can be quite challenging. Having said that, generally if this method is gradually introduced, any child will soon enjoy their reading time.
Your intent as a parent or caregiver would be to encourage a love for reading in your children, and not to ever make reading a part of your child’s list of chores that they have to do.
Because of this, it’s suggested that you should start really slowly. Many kids really don’t enjoy reading by themselves in the beginning, so the best thing to do would be to ask them to read aloud to you. Doing this doesn’t have to interrupt your your own schedule. You could have your child read to you while you are cooking dinner or cleaning up after dinner or even while you are doing laundry.
You don’t always have to be sitting next to your child in order for you to listen to them read. If for instance they happen to need help with a word they can always spell it out to you.
If this isn’t working you can try getting your child to read one page and you read the next page. Once reading becomes part of their routine, you are on the road to having a winner.
Finally, it must be noted that reading can easily be tiring for kids, as it involves a great deal of concentration, so if your child is trying to read something that is beyond their reading level, they simply will not get the benefits out of it that is necessary.
When setting up a time for reading make an effort to turn off the TV or any other distractions, and don’t set a time frame in stone. If you find that your child is becoming frustrated or tired it’s ok to put the book away until the next day. In case your child is getting tired or becoming frustrated, that’s fine just put the book away.
The real purpose of doing extra reading outside of school is to get to a point where your child wants to read and they don’t find reading a chore. If they feel as if they are forced to read they certainly won’t develop a love for it.
It’s your job to try and show your child that reading can be loads of fun. If you’ve exhausted all attempts to make reading time fun, why not sit down and make your child’s reading time your own personal reading time. Children love to imitate their parents, so if they see that you are reading they’ll want to read as well.
So to answer the question of how much time your child should spend reading every day in addition to the amount of time they spend reading while at school can roughly be from 15 to 20 to 30 minutes a day. But this necessarily shouldn’t be set in stone because if your child spends twenty minutes reading a book that is really challenging they will undoubtedly read less words than if they were to read an easier book.
Finally if your child finds a book to read that they are really interested in reading and they would like to read longer than 20 minutes, it’s okay to encourage more reading time. However you don’t want your child to become overly tired.
We as adults sometimes forget that it takes a while for a child’s reading stamina to build up so that they are able to read for longer periods of time.
One final piece of advice, is as parents we should try and introduce our kids to books that they will enjoy and that interests them. Visit the library, find books online to read, comic books are a great way to introduce boys to reading.
Let them read whatever it is that interests them, and you’ll find that by doing this they will soon develop a love for reading.
We hope this article on “how much time should your child spend reading every day” helped you in setting up a home reading schedule for your child. Keep a look out for some of our favorite books that mymamameya highly recommends.
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