Motivating children to read English books with fun activities

Nicola Schofield
A child sat on a bed reading a book

Why is reading important?

Apart from being agreat hobbyand funactivity, it can help children improve in many areas of their lives through developingkey transferrable skills. Reading in their native language and English can bring a whole range of benefits. To engage everyone, they mustunderstand the benefits themselves.

Ask your students why it's important and create a mind map of ideas. You may alsowish to use some of the points below to start the conversation. Having a common idea that everyone agrees on can help build motivation and engagement in the classroom.

Improveslanguage skills

Regular reading develops children’s linguistic skills – it helps them learn goodsentence structure, grammar, vocabulary andimprovesspelling in their own language and in the English language too. Reading aloudalso strengthensknowledge of phonics and improvespronunciationand articulation.

Improves memory

It can help to develop knowledge of phonics and vocabularyrecall and improve focus and concentration– all necessary skills when learning a language.

Cultivates curiosity

Books help kids’ imaginations to growandencourage them to bemore open-minded. Theyhelp us to learn about other cultures and encourage us to think more creatively. Through subtle messages,readingbuildsanawareness of the world in which we live andenableschildren to formtheir ownopinionsand ask questions.

Creates empathy

Stories help to develop children’s emotional intelligenceandempathy towardsothers. Exploringtopics and characters allows them to learn aboutreal-world situationsand think about how they would feelinsomebody else’s shoes. It encouragesrespect for others’ feelingsas well asothercultures.

Reduces stress

It is a great way tocalm the mind and help us relax and destress. Children can learn to use it as a helpful tool in their day-to-day lives.

Develops key life skills

Children develop their confidence, communication, resilience, patience, social skills and connectwith the wider world, cultureand communities.

So how do we motivate our young learners(even our most reluctant readers)to develop a passion for reading?

Itmustbe fun,purposeful and relevant

Well-known adaptationscan remove barriers, support and encourage students’ imagination,andsparka genuine interest. Theygive purpose and relevance to the students as most students have watched a movieat some point in their lives and most students have afavorite movieor character.

Let your young learners choose

There are plenty of English Readers to choose from– if the students can choose their own readers, they will likely be more motivated and focused. Choice gives the students power and makes it more relevant to them. Ask your students to choose theirfavorite movieandhave a vote as a class. Get to know your students, find out what interests them, and base yourbook choice around this.

Rewards

To motivate students, theymust know that they aremaking progress. Reward students for their achievements – for example,createa vocabulary wall ora class book chart and give rewardslikeastickerora postcardto takehome.

Here are five practical, fun ideas on how to further motivate your learners and engage them in reading both in and outside the classroom.

1. Make a bookmark

Making abookmarkis a fun way to get children into the habit of reading more regularly. If they have their own bookmark, then they are more likelyto want to pick up a book and read it. In the activity, the children can make their ownbookmarkbased on theirfavoritebook as well asdraw a picture of theirfavoritescene.

There’s space for them to write about theirfavoritecharacter and any new words they have learned. Thebookmarkthen becomes not only a way tofind your page butitcanalsohelp kids engage in English conversations about the stories and make them feel like they are making progress.

2. Create a mind map

A mindmap is an activity that helps children to understand andanalyzewhat is happening in the book they have just read. Itis a great way to show their understanding of the story clearly. It could also be usedfor doinga short presentation on the book orfor helping towrite a short paragraph about it.

3. Write your own short story

This activity is creative and asks the children to choose theirfavoritereader. They then use their imagination to write a short story about what happens next. They can place charactersin a completely different story of their ownand send them off on a new, exciting adventureor decide what happens next in the original story.

Writing stories like this helps young people to explore their ideas, express their creativity and reinforcesentence structure, vocabulary and grammar at the same time.

4. Create a reading passport

Motivate childrenby giving them clear and achievable goals. Asking them to fill in a passport as they read a new book is a fun way to encourage them.

Each book allows each child to enter a different world andonce they have visited each place, they complete a new page in the passport and receive a stamp.You could even make this a class competition to see who can fill in the passport pages the quickest.

5. Create a character profile

Ask the children to choose theirfavoritecharacter and produce amovieposteron that person. Ask the students to draw a picture andwritekey details about the character, such as name, age, physical appearance and interests. This activity motivates the students as seeing theirfavoritecharacter in a different context can be entertaining and engaging.

With these simple activities, you can make reading a more enjoyable experience, as well as helping with learning English for kids and developing their overall reading skills.

Learn about our readers for young learners

More blogs from app

  • A young child sat at a desk in a classroom writing

    Grammar: how to tame the unruly beast

    By Simon Buckland

    “Grammar, which knows how to control even kings”- ѴDZè

    When you think of grammar, “rule” is probably the first word that pops into your mind. Certainly the traditional view of grammar is that it’s about the “rules of language”. Indeed, not so long ago, teaching a language meant just teaching grammatical rules, plus perhaps a few vocabulary lists. However, I’m going to suggest that there’s actually no such thing as a grammatical rule.

    To show you what I mean, let’s take the comparative of adjectives: “bigger”, “smaller”, “more useful”, “more interesting”, etc. We might start with a simple rule: for adjectives with one syllable, add -er, and for adjectives with two or more syllables, use more + adjective.

    But this doesn’t quite work: yes, we say “more useful”, but we also say “cleverer”, and “prettier”. OK then, suppose we modify the rule. Let’s also say that for two-syllable adjectives ending in -y or -er you add -er.

    Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite work either: we do say “cleverer”, but we also say “more sober” and “more proper”. And there are problems with some of the one-syllable adjectives too: we say “more real” and “more whole” rather than “realer” or “wholer”. If we modify the rule to fit these exceptions, it will be half a page long, and anyway, if we keep looking we’ll find yet more exceptions. This happens repeatedly in English grammar. Very often, rules seem so full of exceptions that they’re just not all that helpful.

    And there’s another big problem with the “rule approach”: it doesn’t tell you what the structure is actually used for, even with something as obvious as the comparative of adjectives. You might assume that it’s used for comparing things: “My house is smaller than Mary’s”; “John is more attractive than Stephen”. But look at this: “The harder you work, the more money you make.” Or this: “London is getting more and more crowded.” Both sentences use comparative adjectives, but they’re not directly comparing two things.

    What we’re actually looking at here is not a rule but several overlapping patterns, or paradigms to use the correct technical term:

    1. adjective + -er + than
    2. more + adjective + than
    3. parallel comparative adjectives: the + comparative adjective 1 … the + comparative adjective 2
    4. repeated comparative adjective: adjective + -er + and + adjective + -er/more and more + adjective

    This picture is more accurate, but it looks abstract and technical. It’s a long way from what we actually teach these days and the way we teach it, which tends to be organized around learning objectives and measurable outcomes, such as: “By the end of this lesson (or module) my students should be able to compare their own possessions with someone else’s possessions”. So we’re not teaching our students to memorize a rule or even to manipulate a pattern; we’re teaching them to actually do something in the real world. And, of course, we’re teaching it at a level appropriate for the student’s level.

    So, to come back to grammar, once we’ve established our overall lesson or module objective, here are some of the things we’re going to need to know.

    • What grammatical forms (patterns) can be used to express this objective?
    • Which ones are appropriate for the level of my students? Are there some that they should already know, or should I teach them in this lesson?
    • What do the forms look like in practice? What would be some good examples?

    Existing grammar textbooks generally don’t provide all this information; in particular, they’re very vague about level. Often they don’t even put grammar structures into specific CEFR levels but into a range, e.g. A1/A2 or A2/B1, and none fully integrates grammar with overall learning objectives.

    At app, we’ve set ourselves the goal of addressing these issues by developing a new type of grammar resource for English teachers and learners that:

    • Is based on the Global Scale of English with its precise gradation of developing learner proficiency
    • Is built on the Council of Europe language syllabuses, linking grammar to CEFR level and to language functions
    • Uses international teams of language experts to review the structures and assess their levels

    We include grammar in the GSE Teacher Toolkit, and you can use it to:

    • Search for grammar structures either by GSE or CEFR level
    • Search for grammar structures by keyword or grammatical category/part of speech
    • Find out at which level a given grammar structure should be taught
    • Find out which grammar structures support a given learning objective
    • Find out which learning objectives are related to a given grammar structure
    • Get examples for any given grammar structure
    • Get free teaching materials for many of the grammar structures

    Think of it as an open-access resource for anyone teaching English and designing a curriculum.