Monday Managament: Reading

I strongly believe in the importance of instilling a love of reading into your children. I believe this is best done by reading to your children, teaching your children to read to themselves, and reading plenty to yourself. In a large family finding the time to get in all of the reading needs for all of your children is extraordinarily difficult.

In the past five years as our number of little people have increased, I have had to rework many times how I get this done. This is how it works in my house right now. As more of my little ones get older, things will have to be reworked yet again.

Last spring, I found that most of my time was being taken up by housework: particularly laundry, dishes and meal making. I really didn't get much time in with my preschool children and you could tell by the way they were acting. I barely got one story in for them a day. I knew things needed to change. I changed up how I cleaned the house (that will be another post) to find the time I needed to read and teach my little kids.

In the mornings, once the laundry is started and breakfast is finished, I read to the little kids. I let them pick out as many books as they want and read to them until they are done. I do not stop until each child has said they have had enough.

In the afternoons, I focus more on the middle kids and older kids. All of these kids will have homework to get done. Along with the homework, the middle kids are required to read at least 20 minutes to themselves.

In the evening after our family scripture study and little kid bedtime, I focus on the current child that is learning to read. Right now, that happens to be Rachel. Rachel reads a chapter from the Book of Mormon stories to me. Then we have a chapter book that we are reading together. Rachel reads the first page to me and then I finish off one or two chapters. I like this method because it both gets Rachel the necessary reading practice and she gets to hear and talk about a book she enjoys but is too difficult for her to read by herself.

Once Rachel is finished and sent to bed, I usually read to the older kids. Sometimes, it is just the oldest two girls while the boys do something with Dad and sometimes I read to Dad and the 4 oldest kids. All of the oldest kids then read in their scriptures before bed. I don't really enforce any sort of extra personal reading on my three oldest because they just always have a book-- mission accomplished.

Reading to myself is a bit trickier. I used to always have 3 or 4 books that I'd be working on at a time. Currently, I just read when I have an interesting book. The rest of my reading time is focused mainly on scripture study and family policy news articles.

The final thing we do to instill a love of reading is take regular trips to the library. This can cost a lot in a large family. It is hard to keep track of library items for 11 people, but I think it would cost a lot more to purchase all the books we read.

A side note: In school here in Utah, the little kids are graded solely on how fast they read a list of words. They are not even encouraged to understand or like what they are reading. I worry about this method a ton, and I tell my kids the opposite. I tell them to slow down and reread until the know what they have just read. I do not care if a first and second grader can speed read a list of words. A list of words has no meaning. We read to understand and to learn.How tragic would it be if children never learned to like and understand books and articles.