If you are a parent and/or teacher, you are probably familiar with the sweet sound of hearing a young child successfully read a book out loud. On the other side of the coin, you no doubt understand how painful and frustrating it can be to listen to a child struggle through a book that is too far beyond their grasp or not interesting enough to engage them.

To help you and your early reader, here are three basic tips for picking the right book when the stakes are high. Find a perfect book now and you can get their reading life off to a solid start, pick the wrong book and you risk a rocky road ahead. After all, a child’s desire to read is the key to them becoming a life-long reader.

  1. Find books that interest the child, even if that means a character-based book. Items like Paw Patrol or Disney-branded books are considered “low brow” in the world of juvenile literature, but if you are trying to hook a new reader, who really cares if the book hasn’t won a Caldecott Medal? Don’t worry, they will eventually graduate to better materials. Besides the usual offenders (i.e. popular characters like Chase and Skye and the Disney Princesses), other eye-rolling hits are creepy creatures (both fiction and non-fiction), highly interactive books and, especially for little boys, anything to do with trucks and machinery.
  2. Use the “five finger rule.” Open a book to the second page and have the child read the page to you. If your child cannot read five words on that page, it is not a “good fit” and your child should choose another book. Getting too complex too quickly can be discouraging rather than motivating. Really, this is a good tip for all reading levels – although you may want to adjust your required word count accordingly!
  3. After reading a page, ask your child some questions about the book. For example, what do you think about what the dog said to the cat? What was the cat’s reaction?  What is the cat’s name? If he or she cannot comprehend what was read, pick a new book. If they don’t understand it, or haven’t been paying enough attention to even create their own narrative around the story, it is probably not interesting to them. At this critical stage, boring books are clearly the enemy.

If you need assistance picking a book that will be motivating to your beginning reader, visit your local library branch and ask a staff member. We have thousands of books as well as helpful people who will be able to point you in the direction of the right one (or two or three!) for your child. Please click here to search our entire catalogue.