>How do you get your kids to embrace summer reading?

>How do YOU get your kids to embrace summer (any!) reading?

We do tons and tons of reading in our house- we do bring books on picnics.  We have special “car” books which are usually lift the flap, ABC books, I Can Read books for my oldest- touchy feely books and soft books for the baby.  I am lucky that so far, all 3 of my little ones love books- but I have had nieces and nephews who didn’t.  Things that we have done as an extended family to help with that are subscribing to magazines that might be of interest to the disinterested reader (one nephew loved sports, so we got Sports Illustrated for Kids, etc.)  My kids each get to pick one magazine to subscribe to on Black Friday (ebates has huge cashback amounts that day, its when we do all of our magazine subscriptions!) so they get High Five and National Geographic Kids in their own names.  (What kid doesn’t love to get MAIL??)

We “read” anything and everything we can.  When we are on walks, or hikes, we look around and talk about things that might look like letters, and if we see signs, we talk about those.  Since my oldest can read now she’s quite often asking me if I am going the speed limit since “it says to only go 55 mommy, are you going 55? mommy? ” 

When there is a fun event coming up (Fourth of July for example) we often will take books from the library out and read them prior to festivities.  One of my sisters is getting married at the end of July so we’ll be finding some fun books about wedding celebrations, etc.  We’ve even read the Home Depot and Lowe’s fliers with the kids (my little guy loves tractors and diggers!).  Got a beach trip coming up?  Let’s get some books about the beach, and animals that live in the ocean and near the beach. 

I love reading.  My mom loved reading.  I am hoping that by making reading fun now and reading books and print, etc. that interests my kids now, it will instill at least a respect of reading, if not like, but hopefully a love of it as well. 

So let’s scoop.  What do YOU do to encourage your kids to read? 

If you are not yet familiar with the I Can Read books, check them out.  Not only are they great early readers but for those times when its late or you are rushed and there isn’t a ton of time or energy to read a long book- these are fairly short.  This series has been around since 1957, with Little Bear.  My oldest brought a Little Bear book home from Pre-K for her “homework” a few months ago.  I STILL love reading Little Bear!! 63 years later there are over 200 titles.  So many familiar faces and places in so many of these books.  (There is more information on the history of I Can Read books here, and also information about Twittermoms and why I am writing this post).

If you click here you can find a bunch of activities to do with your child- FREE- with their favorite characters from I Can Read books!! 

I wrote this blog post while participating in the TwitterMoms blogging program to be eligible to get an “I Can Read!” book. For more information on how you can participate, click here.