Psychologist Tips to Encourage Reluctant Readers

One of my children has a specific language impairment. Watching him read is painful. He's never been able to relax, and the level of concentration required is about as much as it would take me to understand a page of calculations in an astrophysicists notebook. Worse, he lives with a family of bibliophiles. All of us love it, or more to the point find it EASY. He loves stories too, and always has done, he just finds the act of getting them from the page to his head laborious. I've thought long and hard about how to encourage him, and looked at other's recommendations. Here's a list of tips that I've found helpful. I hope at least one strikes a cord with your reluctant readers.

Make it fun
Right from the moment you decide to read together, make the thought of books exciting. If you're lucky enough to have lots of books to read in your house, let them chose the story, maybe even a play a game as you search for it. Then they'll feel in control. If you're off to the library, build the trip up into a fun event. Arrange a playdate with a friend where they lend their favourite books to each other. Anything you can do, no matter how little to reinforce a love of books, is to be encouraged.

Make it a regular part of your day

Psychologists love their routines. There's stacks of research to show if you want to change behaviour you have to make a plan. Build reading into your family's routine, it doesn't matter when, bed-time, after tea, first thing in the morning. Whatever works for you as a family. Your child will love the one to one attention. If reading has already become a battleground due to enforced homework, and you're thinking, no they won't! Think creatively. Take it back to basics, what can you do to make it enjoyable again? If you need a sticker chart, or a promise of console time then do that. Practically any kind of reward is good, the best is a promise of more time with you. (but please don't use food, that could set them up with a lifetime of trouble).

Any reading is great

No matter what your child chooses to read, encourage them. Graphic novel and comics are still reading. My Mum was told off by her teacher friends for taking out a subscriptions to a comics for my brother and I. Even as I child I wondered what their problem was? I was choosing to read wasn't I? Not watch telly? A child's choice to read, now has to compete against the megaliths of Playstation, Nintendo and Microsoft. Who cares if there's a lot of pictures with the text?

Use technology

Use social media for inspiration or ideas. Publishers make a splash when new books are released, and deliberately try to generate excitement. Let their marketing do your work for you. 

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Remember not all screen use is anti-reading. Some games use a lot of text and can be a sly way to get them reading independently everyday.
If your child has a tablet, get them to download books they'd be interested in reading to it. Some children much prefer reading from a screen.

Talk to your Librarian
Libraries in Britain have a whole data-base for children who are reluctant to read or have a specific challenge like dyslexia. Who Knew? (I hope this is worldwide endeavour but I don't have first-hand knowledge of other's countries libraries). Ask for help and your child may discover a whole new world of stories that are easily accessible.

Share the joy
Never be afraid to enthuse about books to your kid. Tell them what you loved as a child. Or even better, read your favourites to them. Inspired by your passion, they may well love them too. If it's not their cup of tea, don't be despondent, they will remember your enthusiasm, and want to search for their own stories that fire their imagination.

Get down with the kids
Story-time doesn't need to be traditional - it can be downright silly if you want. Read in a treehouse, hanging upside down. Set a scene, if you're a Gruffalo in a woods, make those woods, get in the garden or create one in your house. Use silly voices whenever possible. Get right in character yourself. You can even use props. Ask your child to become a character, anything that makes it interactive. My favourite tip is to change the name of a character to your child's name. There's nothing like it to get their attention!

Never ever get cross with them
That is, in relation to reading. I don't live in a fantasy bubble land where parents never get cross with children in general. No matter how frustrated you are by their reluctance to read try not to show it. If children associate reading time with conflict it will make them even more reluctant and undo all your good work.

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Word Count Goals, MS WORD Version

Here’s a trick for writers who need a bit of word count motivation to keep them inspired.

In Microsoft Word, I like to display my current word count, the percentage of my final word count that I’ve completed, and how many words I have left to write. It stares at me from the header and 'inspires' me to keep going until I get that % total ticking over to a nice round number.

This is what mine looks like right now:

I am hoping to get that completed percentage up to 25% by the weekend, but that relies on me actually writing rather than playing with equations.

Here’s how you do it:

1. To display your word count:
Press CTRL-F9. Inside the little { } brackets, type NUMWORDS so it looks like this:
{NUMWORDS} 
Then press F9

2. For your words left to write:
Decide on your final word count. I aim for 80,000 words for YA. You can always adjust this later if your book decides it wants to be longer or shorter.
Press CTRL-F9 TWICE to get { { } }
Make it say:
{ =80000- {NUMWORDS} }
Then press F9 

3. For your percentage complete: Work out what 1 ÷ (your chosen word count) x 100 is. For 80000 words, the answer is 0.00125.
Press CTRL-F9 THREE TIMES. You should see this: { { { } } } 
Now modify the equation to make it look like this:
{ =ROUND ( { =0.00125* {NUMWORDS } } ,1 ) } (n.b. That's a bracket after ROUND and 1, not a weird C)

Then press F9

Those will give you the raw numbers, so add in whatever text you want before and after, and you’re done. Whenever you want to see how you're progressing, right click on the number and hit Update Field. If you want to adjust the equation (to change word count goal, for example), right click and hit Toggle Field Codes. Once you've finished, press F9 to close the equation again.

Now get back to writing, those word goals won’t reach themselves.

p.s. My Mac died but, should it prove resurrectable (is that a word?), I will modify the above instructions and update this post.

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Birnbeck Pier

Creepy abandoned buildings are one of my top sources of inspiration for new novels, so I thought I'd share one of my current favourites here.

At the entrance to Birnbeck Pier, a sign reads 'Death lies this way' which, if you ask me, sounds more like a challenge than a warning. Crumbling buildings, splintered wood, and tufts of grass sprouting from cracked concrete. It's everything I love in a setting, which is why my current work in progress is set on a derelict pier inspired by Birnbeck.

The only UK pier linking an island to the mainland, Birnbeck Pier started out as a Victorian theme park complete with water slides and steamship service. Closed in the 1970s, Birnbeck Pier is now an eerie wasteland. 

The image below is from a BBC article featuring some recent haunting images of the abandoned pier.

And this is a postcard from 1907 showing the pier in its heyday. Check out those fairground rides in the background. I found this image on the Friends of the Old Pier Society website - a non-profit organisation working to save Birnbeck pier.

And here's some drone footage taken by Jon Avery, complete with sinister soundtrack.

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Tiny - The Invisible World of Microbes

Today's science for kids book recommendation is 'Tiny - The Invisible World of Microbes' by Nicola Davies and illustrated by Emily Sutton. The drawings are just lovely and illustrate the wonders of the microbial world perfectly. I've bought it for my 3 year old in the hope that one day in the distant future she'll find it on her bookshelf and fall in love with bacteria too.

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Hidden Universes

I grew up staring out at the stars through my parents’ antique telescopes; marvelling at the tiny pinpricks of twinkling light and how, on a clear night, the Milky Way streaked across the sky. There are more than 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and more than 1,000 billion galaxies in the universe. How many of them, I used to ask myself, contained planets that were home to life like our own sphere of rock and ocean? It was always the potential for life that fascinated me, be it aliens with copper in their blood and sulphurous breath, or plants with red leaves and a taste for nickel. It felt like us humans were just a small part of something infinite in its vastness and, when I thought about it too hard, I became a lone comet tumbling through 46 billion light years of unknowable space.

When I grew tired of feeling small, I played with my parents’ brass microscopes, with their chipped lenses and seized knobs. At first it was leaves and hair and globules of pond water dripped directly onto the mirrors. I never saw very much but the hidden microscopic world fascinated me as much as looking out at the stars. I must have been about ten when the concept of bacteria first took hold of me. I think it was via a book mentioning Anton Van Leeuwenhoek who, back in the 17th century, had fashioned himself a homemade microscope to look at what he described as ‘wee animalcules’ and ‘cavorting beasties’ in fresh water. Of his animalcules, Leeuwenhoek said ‘ten thousand of these living creatures could scarce equal the bulk of a coarse sand grain.’ My view of the universe we live in stretched a little further, much like it had the moment when I’d realised the stars could all be someone else’s sun.

I grew up to become a microbiologist and not an astronomer. From a distance, both fields looked similar to me. Both saw the universe through lenses and mirrors, only one was looking up and the other down. I wanted to see the smallest living creatures in the world because, if we don’t even understand the extremes of life on our own planet, how can we hope to comprehend the breadth of life to be found throughout the rest of existence. The microbial universe was as beautiful as the night sky, with the way Bacillus subtilis formed fractal-like patterns across an agar plate or the rainbow hues of cyanobacteria radiating from the edges of the Yellowstone hot springs. Even the pathogenic species could be wondrous in the way that, wherever you look, life has found a way and a home.

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Kathryn is an ex-research microbiologist-turned-science writer, YA author and parent of one mischievous three year old. She blogs here about the weird and wonderful world around us - from finding beauty and writing inspiration in unlikely places, to the representation of science in kids literature. And anything else that captures her imagination.

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