My 9 year old son refuses to read outside of school and especially during the summer – he’d rather be outside playing. Should I be making him read this summer? I worry that he’s getting further behind in school. Will a few months off make a difference?
Short answer: yes and YES!
And here’s why: “The world has gotten more verbal, boys haven’t,” explains Richard Whitmire in his book Why Boys Fail. College has become the new high school…and preschool has become the new first grade. However, teaching techniques have not changed to accommodate the way he needs to learn.
Whitmire explains, “Poor reading skills snowball through the grades. By fifth grade, a child at the bottom of the class reads only about 60,000 words a year…compared to a child in the middle of the class who reads about 800,000 words in a year.” And “…grading in college is basically based on how well you can write. Somehow that message has not gotten out.” You can’t write well, if you can’t read well.
Michael Gurian, in Boys and Girls Learn Differently explains that “Girls can acquire their complex verbal skills as much as a year earlier than boys…Thus, quite often a preschool girl reads faster and with a larger vocabulary than a peer boy does, and she speaks with better grammar.” Boys get frustrated with this disparity and it’s been shown that children who lag behind in reading are more likely to become discipline problems.
Here’s how to get him to read:
1. Phonics. Yep, phonics. The whole language movement has done our boys wrong. Their brains just don’t work that way. He needs to have the explicit instruction of what a short a sound is compared to a long a sound. These are the building blocks of reading for him.
2. Visual. Boys and comic books go hand-in-hand, but we used to think comics weren’t really reading. Boys are highly visual and having pictures first helps him attach words and meanings. Getting Boys to Read has some great resources.
3. Modeling. Boys are more apt to read if their fathers are readers. In fact, that’s one of the biggest indicators of literacy success! Stop, drop, and read can happen anywhere – for the whole family – make it fun! Check out Guys Read.
4. Negotiate. It may take some work to get him reading for pleasure but he won’t get there if you don’t eliminate the distractions. Video games? Movies? Okay, but he must do 30 minutes (or so) of reading time first.
5. Subject. Well, you might not necessarily choose blood and guts but 9 out of 10 times he will! Allow gross and he will be more interested. There is a lack of boy books out there, but it’s changing. Here are some titles to try. Find material he is interested in – even catalogs, instruction manuals, or magazines.
Have a great READING summer!
