Do you encourage your children to read books?

yes, my child has only started to read but when she was still 1 year old i saw that she loved books. i buy her a lot of interesting books to encourage her more.

My children only have one little gaming system, and it's a learning one. They don't even play with that often, they prefer their other toys or coloring, painting etc. all that kind of stuff. I love to read myself and that is something I definitely want them to be interested in. We visit the library several times a month and they get to pick out their own books. I try to read to them every night before bed and my younger son will often bring me books to read to him every so often throughout the day as well. I am hoping that their interest in reading and enjoyment continues as they get older and I am doing everything I can right now to help that along.

As soon as my girls started school they were pushed to read. The teacher's instructions have always been that they read at least 10 minutes every night. My 15 year old has been a closet reader. Apparently it is not cool to be seen reading at school, but she will wake up in the morning on the weekend and read for a couple of hours. She loves series books, lots of different series books, so they keep her reading. My 11 year old is a lot tougher. I have to continually remind her to read for 10 minutes before she goes to sleep. Sometimes she complains that she doesn't have a book to read. There are tons of books in our house but she just can't seem to find the kind of books she likes to read. She did read one this summer which she told me was "the best book in the world". Of course it was a story about soccer! No matter, as long as she is reading. I let her new teachers know that she has trouble finding stories she likes and therefore doesn't read very much hoping that they can help her find what she may like. She likes to play a lot of sports. Unfortunately, recently, she has gotten hooked on play computer games and chatting on MSN and Facebook. But I still insist that she read every day. If she doesn't at home I am sure she does at school.

The schools make it easy to encourage reading because almost every week my daughter brings home an order form for books to be ordered. We usually will pick a chapter book and read together every night before she goes to bed. When my daughter gets online, I encourage her to do some activities that are good for learning before she gets on to just play around.

My child is 14 months and he loves being read to! This kid has toys galore to play with, dogs that allow him to climb all over them and pull on their tails, and yet his favorite thing to do is carry around a book. He'll bring one up to either me or my husband and hand it to us, then wait until we start reading it. If we don't start reading it fast enough, he starts grunting to let us know he's serious. It's really cool that he's that interested in reading. (I love reading!) We recently rearranged our living room, which has a built in book shelf in one corner. We had dog crates in front of it, with our books up on higher shelves, but I moved the crates and set up the baby's books all on the lowest shelf. Now he can have whatever book he wants!