Part 1
The Bottom Line: If you hope for your child to be a good reader, then let him see you reading...

Reading to children is one of the best methods this old, Kindergarten/First and today Fourth Grade teacher knows for instilling good reading habits in young children. It is invaluable for building the security needed by kids for facing that great big world out there, and for providing you and your children some of the most enjoyable of all your memories.

Because one of my own, now grown, children is Dyslexic I felt learning the basics of reading, and especially in a positive setting where W felt comfort, and secure, to be of even greater consequence. And, I am very happy to say W can and does read. It was a struggle he faced and dealt with as W has everything in life... on his terms.

Very often when encouraging young parents to read to their children I am met with 'what should I read.' My answer never varies. EVERYTHING. Reading books and other printed matter to your kids is an important activity, and should not be finished at kid age 5 or 6... I find that teaching fourth grade and raising kids in the home has served to solidify what I have always known: kids into the middle grades enjoy being read to just as much as do little folks.

Being cuddled on Mom or Dad's lap, or laying on the floor at your feet, with a stack of books on the sofa, snuggling up in the rocking chair (my personal favorite), or wherever beside/nearby you is a lovely activity for both child and parent.

HOWEVER, reading should not stop there. Read TO your kids, AND, let them SEE you reading on your own. Make reading something you do as a matter of course. Read the back of the cereal box, the ingredients on the toothpaste tube, road signs as you pass by, the words on doors as you enter and leave. READ everything and anything so that your kids learn to equate reading as a fundamental for life and not just something you do now and again with a piece of printed matter in your hand because the teacher said it is 'reading time.'

To be honest, it is the considered opinion of this teacher/parent, that it is not the books or whatever themselves which are so important as the fact that YOU are reading to your child or before your child. Parents often find, as I do and did, that little children sit as happily listening when you read stock market news from the newspaper as they do when you are holding a brightly colored 'children's book' in your hands. Both venues are important for helping children develop both a love for reading and an awareness for the importance of the printed word in our lives.

If I absolutely had to choose only one method for reading aloud to my own children when they were tots, it would be the newspaper.... newspapers are filled with the factual information we need to help progress our lives. The pages of the newspaper are filled with information regarding the happenings in our community and the world at large, humor, what's playing down at the bijou, where to find a box of nails, how much we may expect to pay for the new whatsis, when the play opens at the little theater and who is appearing next week at the community center.

Kids learn that printed words are important to OUR lives when PARENTS model that words are important to our lives. And you do that be READING them either aloud, or silently in a time and place when your kids can see or hear you doing so.

"You rotten kids go to your rooms and read until you can behave" is NOT a real good method for teaching kids to enjoy reading. Removing the gameboy, the games, the gee gaws, the computer EVERYTHING except books from kids rooms leaves them choices when sent to their room ... sit and sulk, kick the wall, squall at the top of their lungs, sleep or 9 times out of 9 ... a book to read when they are finished sulking, kicking the wall and squalling 'I hate you' 'this is unfair' etc.

My own kids preferred and continue to prefer reading to sleeping any day.