Encouraging Reading for Pleasure

Not only this though, there are also more benefits for students to read for pleasure too. It’s ideal for developing their literacy skills and educational achievement.

Often though, we see children reaching for a video game or the TV remote rather than a book and they might not read in their spare time at all. So although it’s good for children to do what they love doing in their free time, how can we encourage students to read more?

We’ve taken a look into some ideas and ways to try and motivate children to read at home in their own time, and love doing it too!

Reading displays

Our first idea that you might find helpful is to set up classroom displays that support reading. We know that loads of teachers are really creative and will think of ideas themselves for this. But one thought is that you could have pictures of your students’ favourite books on a display board and a sentence underneath as to why they like that book.

Show students their teachers read too

You could have an assembly where all the teachers club together and talk about their favourite reads or get you and your Teaching Assistants together to do individual book reviews to the class. By showing your students that their teachers love to read, you might encourage them to love it more too.

Set up a reading challenge

You could, as a school, choose a series of books for different abilities and set up a challenge for each year group. With these books, you could have a chart for each student who wants to participate in the challenge that lists all the books chosen for their ability. When students have read a book on the chart, their teachers can tick it off to say they’ve read it. At the end of the term or year, you could hand out certificates or medals to those students who have read all the books. This added incentive is a great way to encourage children to read!

Author of the Month initiative

Every month, you could have an author that you focus on at school and put a display board up about or have an assembly dedicated to. This could be Roald Dahl or Hans Christian Andersen but whatever happens, the focus on an author and having the books they’ve written on view may help to encourage students to think about reading a book by them.

Book reviews

Another way to encourage reading is by having book reviews to read by students. You could have a section in the school newsletter on a book review, an assembly where students share book reviews or a place in the school that shows them. By showing book reviews by students, other students might take note of this and be encouraged to read too.

Do you have any other ideas on encouraging students to read for pleasure? Let us know by tweeting @EducationCity.