How to Engage Children to Read

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Ann Kennedy and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm here to talk to you about understanding the nature of reading. Engaging children to read. Where and when does it start? It starts every time you go to the grocery store. You're at a grocery store, you pick up a jar of blueberry jam and you pick up a jar of blackberry jam. You show your child. This is blueberry jam and you can see the color is blue. One of the first concepts in learning to read is colors. So the child now knows the word, the vocabulary blue. Then you show blackberry jam. You may say, depending on the child's ages, would you like some blueberry jam and toast for breakfast tomorrow morning or blackberry jam? If the child is very young, you'll say mmm, I think I'm going to take blueberry jam. Did you every give a reading lesson? No, but you did. You gave the most important motivational tool that you ever could to your child by talking to your child, pointing out the differences in colors and letting the child realize that reading has a purpose because then maybe the next morning he'll discover, I don't like blueberry jam and come the next time you go to the grocery store, he'll choose blackberry jam. Every single time you go to a grocery store, just do it one time, point out different colors, for example, here's your black beans and here's sliced carrots. So you pick out some carrots, you pick out some beans and say hmmm, I wonder what I want for dinner tonight. That's so pretty, the orange color and these are all black and look like so much fun, let's go with the orange carrots. That simple, that quick, it doesn't take more than a minute and a half at a grocery store and you have just enhanced your child's ability in school, motivated them to read. So colors are very very very important in the early stages of reading and it has meaning. The meaning is that they know that they're going to be eating whatever you picked. There's a purpose to reading and you're thinking out loud. One of the most important things you can do with your child is to show them, to talk, to talk to your child. So that is reading happens everywhere."