An Activity to Promote Reading in Children: 12 Months, 12 Characters
Due to the arrival of new technologies, now children and young people are more interested in other types of activities than literature. That’s why, nowadays, parents, educators, and library professionals must find news to promote reading in children with numerous creative and ingenious activities that attract children’s attention.
As there are many children’s books out there, there are several activities to promote reading in children. All you need is a little imagination and creativity. Below, you’ll find an idea that you can develop both at home and in the classroom to promote reading in children for an entire year.
12 months, 12 characters: activities to promote reading in children
Although you can create many activities around children’s literature, and more specifically to promote reading, not all of them attract children’s attention. Thus, can you imagine having the possibility of solving this issue for an entire year? With the activity that we propose below, it’ll be possible!
First step: choose the characters
The first step, and the one that will mark the evolution of the activity throughout the year, is to choose the characters. In other words, choose the books that you’ll work with in the coming months. We mentioned above that you can do this activity both at home and in the classroom, as parents and teachers can choose the books.
Depending on your children’s age and their reading speed and comprehension, you should choose some books over others. Keep in mind that choosing books for a single child isn’t the same as choosing books for an entire class. In the latter case, the level must be intermediate so that everyone can participate in the activity.
For example, for children between the ages of three and five, you can work with the following books:
- Elmer the Patchwork Elephant by David McKee.
- The Color Monster: A Story About Emotions by Anna Llenas.
- The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business by Werner Holzwarth.
- A Taste of the Moon by Michael Grejniec.
Second step: choosing the complementary activities
After reading these books, you can create numerous activities. For example, artistic expression through drawing and painting the characters and creating a set of memory cards related to different aspects of the books.
This age, in addition, is ideal to promote storytelling. Thus, there’s no better way to promote reading in children than through oral transmission.
Other types of activities
If the children are older, meaning that they can read on their own, the activities can be more complex, as well as educational.
For children ages eight to nine, and destined for schools, one of the activities that will help them improve their oral expression will be presenting the book they’ve read to their classmates. In this regard, we advise you to choose characters who are the main characters of several books, to be able to use several during the entire month the character will last.
Main characters such as Waldo, Harry Potter, the Cat in the Hat, and Winnie the Pooh are some of the options that you can choose, among many others.
The last part of the activity to promote reading in children
As we mentioned above, the 12-month, 12-character initiative lasts one year. By the end of that year, children will have read a minimum of one book per month. However, you must try to make sure that they read more than that.
In order to see all the reading progress children made during a year, you can make a small notebook or file of each one of the books. Depending on the children’s age, you can include information about the book, such as the title, the author, or the publisher, in addition to others, such as the time it took the child to read the book, the number of stars they give the book, and even a drawing of what they liked the most.
This way, imagination and creativity, as well as written expression, come into play without them even realizing it.