Reading is just about the most important skill for a student to have. It can be tough for some kids to get excited about it. Whether it is a book report, history assignment, or something else, reading is often seen as a chore. One of the best ways to help change their attitude towards reading is to make it fun. Here are some ideas you can try to make reading fun for your students.
Reading Contest
If you really want to make it fun, why not turn reading into a competition? What better way to motivate students is there? You’d be surprised how a contest with a reward at the end will motivate kids. Make it easy for them to track their progress toward the end goal and let the fun begin.
Book Covers
Give your students a chance to be creative with their reading assignments. After students have finished reading a book, have them create a book cover to go along with the book. Make it more fun by setting up a bulletin board to display all the fun and interesting covers they come up with.
Post-It Notes
Give your students a little something extra to think about by sticking post-it notes inside books they are reading in the classroom. Write questions like, what do you think will happen next or what would you do next and put them in selected parts of the book. Then have the students answer those questions when they find the post-it notes. It’s a fun and easy way to see how they are understanding what they are reading.
A Fun Environment
Create an atmosphere students will enjoy for their reading time. They will enjoy having a dedicated time for reading where they all have their own book. Let them find a fun spot to sit in the room and dive into their story for 20-30 minutes. This becomes even more fun if you can add some bean bag chairs or other special spaces to sit in. Why don’t you join them in the reading while you’re at it?
A Soundtrack
Add to the fun environment with a little bit of background music. Jazz and classical music are great options for this. Music helps your auditory learners to focus on their reading with no lyrics to distract them.
Reading Wagon
Keep a wagon in your classroom and let your students select books to fill the wagon. And decorate it too. When you have reading time, let one of your students take the wagon around the class and deliver books to their classmates. Then do it again when it is time to put the books back in the wagon.
The Bulletin Board
Choose a theme and create a bulletin board with spots for all of your students. Then you can reward your students when they read with recognition on the bulletin board. This is also a great way to teach them about how to keep a reading log. Give them a sticker, star, or some other mark for everything they read and pretty soon the board will be covered!
Confirm Comprehension
This is a fun way to have students work in groups. Divide the class into groups of 4-6 and give them a reading assignment. Once the reading has been finished, have each of them write down something important from the reading. Then have them work as a group to put the items they wrote down in sequential order or rank them by importance.
Book Exchange
You’ll need to find another class to work with for this one. Let your students work together to select books that they want to trade with the other class. Then bring the two classes together. Have them tell the other class about the books they are trading. When it is time to return the books to the other classroom, pair the students up to discuss the books together.
Sound Effects
Keep your class involved by adding some sound effects to any stories that are read together as a class. Just pick a few of the students in your class and assign them to make a sound whenever a certain word is read. For example, if you are reading something that has animals in it, you could have students make animal sounds each time animals are mentioned throughout the story.
A Free Toolkit
In addition to the tips above, this free toolkit is available and offers the best practices for creating reading assignments that students will love and complete in half the time. Here’s what your toolkit will provide:
- Connect the student to the key ideas in the text in a surprisingly simple way
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