Strategies to Nurture a Love of Reading in Primary Students
I was a primary classroom teacher and it was very important for me to nurture a love of reading in my students. I am a mother and I continued to nurture this love of reading with my children at home. I would like to share some strategies that have helped me to nurture a love of reading in my students and my own children:
Reading Reflections: Students especially primary ones will only read if they enjoy it and have a positive experience or if they can make positive connections to the story they are reading. It is imperative that primary students think and talk about their experience while reading to motivate them to read more.
Children will only do things that they enjoy doing. When they have a positive reading experience especially one in which they learned something, felt a connection in a story or guide them to name those positive experiences.
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When I taught fourth grade, I would always ask my students the question, "Why Read?" Students would come up with many reasons as they could think of for why they should read. It was great fun and the reasons were exhibited on a wall in the classroom for the students to remember the reasons for reading and loving it.
Students need to be excited about reading new words: During reading sessions with my students, we would identify a word or two every reading session that got them excited about a new word. This could be one word that they might, or might not, want to use. There is great joy in discovering a new combination of sounds, of a word that exactly describes a feeling, place or a memory. We repeated the word and used it in different ways. We played with it, and had fun. It is a good idea not to identify too many words per reading session. Reading is all about words and how we interpret