New-Languages

With multimedia everywhere, and accessible at a click of a button. children can find many more pleasant and fun alternatives to reading a good old-fashioned book. The reality for many kids though is: if they don't start reading for pleasure, for information and for learning, reading will increasingly become a dull and difficult task for them.

It needn't be. There are many simple and easy methods to help your kids and your students make progress, enjoy reading and find their own way in a world of books.

Motivate them, Interest them!

One way to get kids to start to enjoy reading is to involve them in reading about things that interest them. Books aren't the only way to get children to read; newspapers and magazines have enough variety to appeal to any interests your students might have.

The key to getting children to read is to make it fun. They need to be motivated; adults know that their actions bring rewards but children usually need to see some tangible benefit before they'll make a sincere effort. For young children fun is often the only motivation they need whereas older kids might need something more tangible such as special privileges or a material reward. One way to motivate children is to ask them what would make it worth their while to read and what type of reading they would like to do. You might be surprised how creative they can be!

Print Media: Cutting, Pasting, Sharing

Using print media to encourage reading can be a lot of fun. There are many magazines geared towards children of all ages and newspapers can be read by nearly any age due to the variety of their content. Since both deal mostly with current events and human interest, a child would be hard pressed not to find something that interests him.

One way to use newspapers to encourage reading is to ask the students to choose an article from any section of the publication and read it. They can then make their own illustration and see if the class can guess what the article was about. Once they do, the student can summarize the article and the class can discuss it or even offer ideas of how they would do things differently.

You may also want to have a "word of the day" to guide your students' choices. The word "truck" could yield articles on transportation, roads, driving careers, food supply chains or even truck competitions. You could choose the word yourself, have the class vote on a few choices or play a short vocabulary game and let the winner choose the word of the day.

Magazines can be even more fun! One way to get kids to read is to have them pick a subject they like, find a magazine article to read about it and make a small presentation complete with pictures cut out of the magazine. If a child is interested in architecture, for instance, he or she could read an article on how a house is built then show how they would decorate the interior or landscape the property.

Such lessons don't have to be costly, either. Students can bring magazines and newspapers to class that their families or neighbors are no longer using and faculty can contribute as well. This is also an ideal project for home school students.

By letting children read about what interests them they will find that not only do they enjoy reading, they want to do more of it.

Kenneth is a teacher with many years of experience in ESL at Dickson's English School in Tamsui, Taiwan. You can visit the school blog at http://www.nozkidz.com/en to find out more about what students are doing, how important fluency is, and how much fun we're having. For other advice and help, check out his column at http://www.nozkidz.com/en