Kids Who Don't Like to Read

I had a break through of sorts on our visit to our grandkids in London. My oldest grandson(7),a reluctant reader(to use an out of fashion term), read one of his reading books to his 3 year old adoring brother and he actually enjoyed it! As I listened to his effort, I was reminded of the many children, mostly boys but some girls too, whom I tried to help through their learning-to-read days. We librarians know the secret to growing readers .... find the books they want to read. But just because we know the secret doesn't mean it's easy. Believe me, I've had some hard nuts to crack so to speak, and I certainly wasn't successful in every case. Those of us who didn't struggle to read probably can't even remember how we learned to read, so somehow we think it shouldn't take as long as it actually does to reach fluency. As in all things, success begets success and those children who start out slowly (I'm not talking about the kids with learning problems here)can get discouraged pretty quickly. There's no way they get better at reading if they don't practice reading. That's where we librarians come in. The first step is to find out their interests. My grandson loves all things Star Wars so I had bought him a few of the DK beginning reader books about the subject. We spent a fun half hour making a list of the books he wanted from the titles on the back of those books. We ended up with 32 titles! Intermingled with the expected space adventure type books are a few surprising ones .... Born to be a butterfly; I can swim!; A trip to the theater. But are they surprising for a boy whose other Grandma raises butterflies, whose aunt and uncle are actors and who loves boogie boarding? Now my job is to bundle up some of these books and send them off to London. I'm going to start with the easier reading level titles in the hopes he will read to his brother again. And I'll be sure to have a number of other titles from his list scattered around the house when he is here in April. I'm hoping he'll become a reader before he knows it.