Raising Readers Campaign- Making Reading Enjoyable & Activty-3

Quick Recap

Raising Readers is a 4 weeks long campaign to help kids develop a love for books & reading. We hope you have started the reading journey with your kid and hope the tips and resources from previous posts have helped you along. If you haven’t checked them yet, read them here and here.

Remember, you can get your kid started in this beautiful journey of bonding over books anytime. It’s never too late to start but to make it sustainable for a lifetime, the journey has to be made enjoyable.

Tips to make the reading journey enjoyable

One of the frequent queries that we received is what can be done to make a hyperactive kid sit and read a book?

Well, here is the short answer. You need to make the kid ENJOY the book and not just read the book. This can be done easily and here are a few things that you can try:

Personal Bonding

For a kid, reading time is more about bonding with their parent/caretaker than the actual reading. It is about creating a memory.

So fix a time every day to bond over books. Read the book aloud. It can be in any language. All that the kid seeks here is comfort from your presence and voice.

Sensory experience

When starting out, opt for colourful picture books or touch and feel or sound books (you can find resources on where and what to buy, here). Let the kid explore books for their pictures and texture first, like they do with a toy.

With an appeal to their senses, exploring books becomes more enjoyable.

Involve others in the family too

It can be more fun when kids get exposed to different ways of storytelling. This can happen when people of different ages, say, a grandparent, a sibling or a friend can all read out the same story to the kid at different times or occasions.

Book conversations

Bring conversations around books in your day to day life. Say if you just read about traffic signals in the book, make sure to show them the traffic lights while you are on a drive.

Activities around books

As simply sitting and reading a book can tend boring for starters, you can club reading with other activities.

You can include some craft works related to the topic or playing a sport mentioned in the book, or list out things mentioned in a book and identify them in your home, or have pretend-play sessions on the topic around the book.  

Hope these help you get an idea of how to make book reading an enjoyable activity than a mundane chore. To help you get started, here come activity 3 of the Raising Readers Campaign.

Raising Readers Contest

We hope you are aware of the ongoing contest and as part of it, here is your Activity-3.

Activity 3-Accessorize Your Book

This is going to be super easy and super fun. Here’s a video on DIY Kawai Origami Bookmark, video courtesy: Roshna Salim.

All you got to do is take some time out, sit with your kid, get your hands on paper and colours and little glue and make this bookmark together.

Take a pic of your kid helping or making the bookmark and also a pic of your kid holding their favourite book accessorized with this bookmark. Keep them ready for uploading.

We are so eagerly waiting to see those proud creations and happy smiles!!

Hope you have got your videos and pictures ready (check out this content checklist picture ) from the previous activities. In the next few days, there will be a few other activities. Once everything is done, you can upload your entries here: Raising Readers Contest Form.

Happy Reading! Happy Exploring!