5 Ways to Boost Parental Engagement with Reading

It can sometimes be challenging to encourage children to read at home. Here are our 5 practical tips and ideas to help boost parental engagement with reading.

1) Find out how parents engage with reading at home

Some schools will send out surveys to find out how parents engage with reading with their child at home. The Open University, suggested 24 hour reads, where children record everything they have read, from cereal boxes, to books, to comics. They hope that these surveys will help teachers to understand what children are reading at home (including texts in different languages) and who they are reading to.

2) Make it clear which books are core texts and which are reading for pleasure

Although children will have to read some core texts, make it really clear to parents which texts are purely for reading for pleasure. (On Pageticker, our digital reading diary, children will be assigned books for core texts by their teacher but they can also have books recommended.)

3) Think about arranging informal events

It might be that you run a reading cafe with tea and biscuits, where parents come in and read with their children. Some schools run a stay and read, where parents drop off their children and then stay and read. Obviously, you could also, if you had time run a reading workshop but this would be a more formal setting.

4) Use the library

If you are lucky enough to have a school library then consider running any school events, for example, book or cake sales in the library. Or any reading spaces that you might have available.

5) Reading Role Models at Home

In the survey, you could find out any person that the child reads with. It might be another adult is a reading role model or perhaps even a sibling. You can then use this information to encourage and support reading at home.

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