Are those bookcases looking a little less dusty, lately? We hope so! As you celebrate reading and create a culture in which a variety of books are available and reading is prioritized, you’ll want to celebrate some more! While maybe it’s the journey, not the destination, that you want to emphasize, everyone likes to see fruits of their labors. By celebrating the intrinsic rewards of learning, reading, and achieving goals, you can set your child up to be a lifelong learner and enjoy a few extra surprises!
Create Goals and/or Track Reading
Depending on your child’s developmental and reading level, you may want to create goals in the form of number of books or pages or amount of time. For some kids, creating specific goals may be counterproductive — either because the goals seem daunting and take the fun out of reading, or because when they’ve met the “goal,” they’ll be done, instead of reading for enjoyment.
Try to get a feel for whether your child will benefit from specific goals, and then print a reading chart like this game board or this one for older kids — or just decide on a way to log reading time or number of books.
Learn Together and Demonstrate Skills
Most effective learning is demonstrated, not just discussed (or marked down on a test paper, for that matter). When you read with your child and learn a new skill or lesson, you can then explore the topic more fully via video, additional print resources, or online searches. When your child gets to show others in your family or social circle about what he or she is learning, the enthusiasm that comes with understanding something in a new way and validity from being able to demonstrate it can be quite rewarding — especially if it helps someone or solves a problem in some way.
Maybe you want to set out to learn how to compost, train a difficult plant, or make something from scratch. Perhaps your older child or teen can learn how to organize and earn money for a family weekend trip or barbecue — or something even more significant!
Provide Extra Benefits
From pizza to free books, and cold, hard cash, many free summer reading programs offer added incentives. You may want to use them as incentives, or you might want to let your child learn to enjoy reading and learning on their own merits, along with the fulfillment of goals and demonstration of new skills, and then surprise them at the end of the summer with extra benefits of rewards programs in which you’ve enrolled them on the sly.
Whichever way you choose to utilize these freebies, the best part is that you can double-dip with your local library’s incentives and end up with quite the loot!
At the end of the summer, hopefully those bookcases will be completely free from dust, and your child will have discovered the treasures found in books!
From The Bedroom Source Blog
- Lice in Your Child’s Mattress, Part 1
- Lice in Your Child’s Mattress, Part 2
- Paula Deen Guys Furniture & Some of Your Son’s Favorite Things
The Bedroom Source
Located near the Roosevelt Field Mall on Long Island, NY, The Bedroom Source is your source for the best collection of children’s and teen bedroom furniture. From flexibly configurable Maxtrix furniture to fashionable Berg collections, The Bedroom Source offers high end furniture and professional design assistance to create the bedroom of your child’s dreams.
Contact the friendly staff at The Bedroom Source by calling (516) 248-0600 or by visiting www.BedroomSource.com. When you buy from The Bedroom Source, you are buying from a family owned, local mom & pop furniture store; when you shop at The Bedroom Source, you are dealing directly with the owners. We professionally assemble everything we sell. We deliver to Long Island, the 5 Boroughs of New York City, Rockland, southern Connecticut, and northern New Jersey.
Image credits: Top © matttilda/Fotolia. 2nd © jppi/Morguefile. 3rd © ToymanRon/Morguefile. 4th © phaewilk/Morguefile.
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