Kara Winerman’s bright purple hair is the same color as the cape draped over her shoulders. She’s trying to engage an audience of elementary school kids and their parents, who are perched on benches eating pizza, playing games, and reading a wide variety of colorful books.
Winerman finally employs a classic classroom-management tactic: She shushes the group into silence to begin her presentation on how to get students to read for fun at home.
“Who’s your favorite superhero?” she asks. Spiderman is a crowd favorite, but some parents sheepishly name their own parents. It’s the segue that Winerman needs. She launches into how parents have the “superpower” to guide their children’s reading journey.
As the director of programs for Turning the Page, a Washington-based literacy nonprofit, Winerman has coached generations of parents on how to encourage a love of reading in their children. “We see the strengths that parents already have and we position ourselves as their ally with right-time resources that don’t add immensely to their plate,” she said.
Turning the Page partners with schools—such as Lee Montessori-East End Elementary School here, which Winerman spoke at last month—to host workshops for parents after school and consults with families one-on-one on how to engage reluctant readers.
Winerman’s efforts are part of a national push to reignite a love for reading in students. It’s an uphill battle, though. National reading scores, already on a decline, cratered during the pandemic. Students these days are also far less keen to pick up a book for fun—a 2021 Pew Research Center report shows that far fewer 9- and 13-year-olds read daily “for fun” than in 1984.
To cultivate a habit of reading, schools, community organizers, and parents need to collaborate to create the right reading conditions for students.
It’s a volume game
The more students read, the better they get at it. But not all families have easy access to a variety of books.
Turning the Page gives families a bundle of age-appropriate books to build their home libraries. The Providence school district in Rhode Island has installed book vending machines in schools, from which students can select books they’re interested in, free of charge.
Many districts also partner with local libraries and corporate organizations to get more books into kids’ hands. The Broward County sdistrict in Florida runs reading competitions and book drives in collaboration with the Florida Panthers, a professional hockey team, to stock “little libraries” across the region.
The focus is fun, not phonics
In class, teachers can take care of the basics. But reading outside of class should be a fun, social activity, said Lori Canning, the director of family and community engagement at the Broward County school district.
It organizes reading challenges in which schools that log the highest number of books win special prizes like coupons for Panthers games, team merchandise, and pep rallies with the team mascot.
In Providence, schools encourage students to create short “movie trailers” or video reviews of books they’ve read to share with their peers. The district also hosts book battles between schools, where students are quizzed about characters in the books they’ve all read.
Winerman has tried to inculcate reading in routine family activities like cooking together. Parents can use cookbooks to boost their kids’ vocabulary, background knowledge, and comprehension while they read recipes aloud. And if families listen to audiobooks together, parents can follow that up with reading from the physical version of the book so that kids can connect print to speech.
Parents need to expand their idea of what constitutes “reading,” said Javier Montanez, the superintendent of the Providence district. Audiobooks, magazine articles, newspapers, manga, and cookbook recipes all count—all that matters is if the material engages students, he added.
Incentivize reading, but do it the right way
Rewarding reading can go a long way—but it isn’t a catch-all strategy for a lasting interest in books. Reading is “effortful,” so schools and parents must work harder for kids to see its worth, said Amy Stornaiuolo, a professor of literacy education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. “Reading takes a particular cognitive energy.”
Relying only on external motivators can establish a transactional relationship with reading—kids won’t read because they love the stories, they’ll read to get something from the process, Stornaiuolo added.
But if such incentives are part of a bigger plan, external motivation could gradually turn internal. These campaigns connote a “cool cultural value” to reading, she said: for instance, winning a book as a prize for completing a task or awarding a coupon for a new book at a scholastic fair when a student checks out and reads three books from the library.
That generative loop where kids are reading to earn books, which helps them read more and enjoy it, can be powerful, said Stornaiuolo.
