In today’s fast-paced living, reading often rides in the backseat of the entertainment car. And while the advances of technology are wonderful inventions, reading is the only entertainment medium that’s also an essential life skill.

Among other benefits, reading boosts intelligence, provides competence in school and for future jobs, and it inspires the imagination like no digital medium can.

...And with the explosion of information in the workplace, only avid readers can stay relatively effortlessly well informed.

Simple Tips on Reading

• Have lots of books

• Buy books at car boot sales and charity shops

• Go to the library

• Read books aloud, including comic books and poetry

• Use your special talents to make reading come alive for your children. For example, give each character in the story a different voice or accent

• Teach children to read to themselves

• Have a special book-looking-at or story time on a regular basis

• Treat your child as a reader; sooner or later they’ll be one.

• Make books part of the social scene (i.e., when friends come over, suggest reading stories or reading games).

• One way to help your children form a habit of reading, without trying to regiment their reading, is by encouraging series books.

• Provide reading material that is easy and fun for children. You want them to have the experience of effortlessly breezing through books.

• Increase your child’s self-confidence by treating him as a reading expert in their field. Ask your child’s opinion about the books he’s reading. Take their opinion seriously.

• Encourage daily reading by having irresistible reading material wherever your children spend a lot of time — in the kitchen, in their bedrooms etc.

• Find books that completely absorb your children. Find magazines and non-fiction books about their current passion or interests.

• While children often enter reading through a particular interest — they read everything they can find on sports, for example — they develop many other interests through years of reading.