The short version
To get kids interested in reading, read to them. That is the whole answer, and every five year old knows it. Reading aloud enlarges a child’s vocabulary, exposes them to sentences more complex than speech, and ties books to a person they love. Keep doing it long after they can read alone.
Ask a five year old
Ask a five year old what they want and they will tell you. A story. Read me one. Read me the same one again.
Parents spend money on reward charts, apps and levelled book schemes trying to solve a problem a child has already solved for them. Read to them. It is free, it takes fifteen minutes, and nothing else in this field comes close.
This page is written for parents and for teachers, and it is going to be blunt, because most advice on this subject is warm and useless. Warmth without a method leaves you exactly where you started, with a child who would rather do anything than open a book.
We spend our time on speed reading and on the mechanics of the eye, which sounds a long way from a bedtime story. It is not. Everything that goes wrong for an adult reader started in childhood, and most of it started with a child who found reading hard and quietly gave up on it.
Why reading aloud works when nothing else does
Three things happen when you read to a child, and none of them happen when you hand them a book and hope.
Their vocabulary grows. Books use words that nobody uses at the dinner table. A child hears them in context, hears them again a week later, and owns them before anyone has taught them a thing.
Their grammar stretches. Written sentences are longer and more layered than spoken ones. Speech is short, broken and full of gestures. A read-aloud story makes a child follow a sentence that turns a corner and comes back, and following it is the skill that later lets them read one.
And they form a relationship. Not with reading in the abstract. With the book, and with you. The story arrives in a voice they trust, at the end of a day, in a warm room. That association is doing more work than any of the vocabulary.
Reading aloud also gives a child the sound of a sentence. Punctuation, pace, the pause before the last word of a joke. None of that is on the page in any obvious way. They learn it from your voice and they carry it into their own reading, which is where expression comes from.
Reading to children teaches them to read. It sounds too simple to be a method. It is the method.
Do not stop when they can read alone
Here is where most families fall down. The child cracks the code at six or seven, reads a page unaided, and the parent stops. Job done. Over to you.
It is not done. A child who can decode words can decode words. That is not the same as loving books, and it is nowhere near the same as reading well. Stop reading aloud at seven and you take away the one thing that made books feel like pleasure, at the exact moment reading turns into schoolwork.
Keep going. Read to a nine year old. Read to an eleven year old. Read to them past the point where it feels slightly odd, and then read to them some more.
Read to teenagers too
In his book ‘Reads Like a Novel’, Daniel Pennac tells teachers to read aloud to teenagers if they want them to love books. Not to set the book. Not to test them on it. To read it to them, out loud, with no exam at the end.
It works for the same reason it works at five. A story delivered in a human voice, with no strings attached, is an offer rather than a demand. Teenagers refuse demands. It is their job.
Stop turning books into homework
The fastest way to kill a child’s appetite for reading is to attach a task to every book.
Comprehension questions. A worksheet. A book report. A reading log to be signed by a parent and counted by a teacher. Each one is reasonable on its own. Together they teach a child that a book is a test with a cover on it.
A child is allowed to read a book, enjoy it, and say nothing about it afterwards. That is what adults do. Nobody hands you a quiz after a novel.
Let them read rubbish
Comics. Football annuals. The same dinosaur book for the eleventh time. A series so formulaic that you can predict every chapter by page two.
Let them. A child who reads rubbish is a child who reads. The habit is what you are building, and the habit does not care about literary merit. Taste comes later, and it comes on its own, and it never comes to a child who was made to feel that their choices were wrong.
The trap of the slow reader
This is the part that most reading advice for parents leaves out, and it explains why the child who says they hate reading usually is not being difficult.
Children read at around 150 words per minute. Some read far slower. A slow reader gets less story per minute of effort, so reading costs them more and gives them less. So they read less. So they stay slow.
That is a vicious circle, and it tightens. A slow reader loses the thread of a sentence before reaching the end of it, so they go back and read it again. Those backward jumps are reading regressions, and they slow the reader further. Slower reading kills anticipation, because you cannot guess where a sentence is going if you are still crawling through the middle of it. Without anticipation, comprehension falls, which causes more regressions.
Slow readers rarely read for pleasure. That is the sentence to hold onto. It is not that they lack interest and therefore read slowly. They read slowly and therefore lose interest, and the two are easy to mistake for each other from the outside.
Reading is like riding a bike. Below a minimum speed it becomes difficult and unsteady, and it stops being fun. Nobody enjoys wobbling.
So when a child says reading is boring, listen to what they might mean. Reading is hard work and I get nothing back for it. That is not a taste problem. That is a fluency problem, and you fix it differently.
Fixing fluency, which is what they actually need
Reading fluency is reading smoothly and accurately, at a decent speed, with expression and understanding. A non-fluent reader spends so much effort on the words that nothing is left for the meaning.
You build it by repeated reading. The same passage, several times, until it flows. It feels pointless to an adult and it is the single most reliable thing you can do for a struggling child. Speed comes up, expression arrives, and comprehension follows, because the effort has moved off the words and onto the story.
Read the passage to them first, at a natural pace, so they hear what it should sound like. Then read it together. Then let them do it alone. Our page on reading fluency sets out what to expect and how to measure it.
Do not make it a performance. Do not correct every word. A child being corrected is a child who has stopped listening to the story.
Around ten, teach them technique
Somewhere around the age of ten, a child is ready to be taught how reading works. Not phonics. Technique. How the eye jumps and pauses. Why going back over a line costs you. What it means to take in a group of words instead of one word at a time.
Teaching speed reading techniques in schools at that age would have a large and lasting effect on reading habits, and almost no school does it. Children are taught to read at five and then never taught anything about reading again. Imagine teaching a child to hold a tennis racket and never mentioning footwork.
Things that help, in order
Read aloud every day, at a set time, without fail. Fifteen minutes.
Let them see you read. A parent who reads is a stronger argument than a parent who tells. Children copy what you do and ignore what you say, and they are right to.
Put books where the child is. Not in a room they never enter. On the floor, in the car, next to the bed, in the bag.
Let them choose. Every time. Even when the choice is bad.
Talk about the story like a person, not a teacher. What did you make of him. I did not see that coming. Did you.
Kill the screen at reading time. A moving image beats a still page every time, because the eye is built to chase movement, and a child’s eye is worse at resisting it than yours. Our page on reading on screen versus paper explains why the fight is not fair.
What to expect
Do not expect a convert in a fortnight. You are building a habit, and habits build at the speed habits build.
Give it a year. A child read to every day for a year is a different reader, and the change is hard to see day by day. You notice it when they carry a book to the table and you did not ask them to.
Expect the child to enjoy reading before they are good at it. That is the right order and it is the only order that lasts. A child who enjoys reading will read enough to become fluent. A fluent child who hates reading will stop the day nobody makes them.
Enjoyment first. Everything else follows it.
If you want to see the mechanics for yourself, take the speed reading test and watch what your own eyes do. Then look at what we know about reading speed by age, so you can judge where your child sits without guessing. Most of what looks like a lack of interest turns out, on inspection, to be a child working far too hard for far too little. Fix that and the interest arrives on its own.
