The Hard Road to Reading

Everyone who know HistoryBoy knows he loves to read.  Give him a book on Disasters, WWII, planes, trains, battleships, we are god to go.  He will pore over them for hours and hours. One of his favorite books is The Encyclopedia of Aircraft of WWII.  I think it was a b-day gift from HyperGirl and SassyGirl.  They know what he likes. LOL 

Fiction is a sticky issue.  He will read what he has to for school but beyond that. 

It used to be relatively easy. Magic School Bus were full of information, fact filled fiction with a TV series on PBS he loved.  The books started younger and then there was a chapter book series. Perfect!  The fact that Ms. Frizzle was a little nuts made it funny for him too and introduced him to puns and jokes which was great.


From there he jumped right into the Magic Tree House series.  It was also wonderful.  Stories filled with learning and every book had a reference guide that he could read to give him more info about the topic. AWESOME!  

After those, it was hit or miss until I remembered Encyclopedia Brown.  I loved them as a kid and so did my brother.  It took reading the first two chapters to him on the first book to get him interested. Then he kept reading and finished out most of the series.  It wasn't a fact filled at the previous series but it was logical and made sense so it worked.

I've tried to get him into other books and series but it has been difficult.  I sit and read with him and if the book grabs him he reads if not... Like I said difficult.  He complains it is boring.  There are not a lot of fact filled fiction or fiction book about disasters that are age appropriate.  It a roadblock I have been trying to overcome.

This year we hit a MAJOR obstacle . In his Literacy/Language Arts class he need to read 40 books this year. 40!?!  That's a book a week AND only 2 are non-fiction (biographies).  So that's 38! FICTION books for the kid who is not interested so he can pass 7th grade. HELP!!

I decided to just try a new series.  I picked up The Capture by Kathryn Lasky.  It the first on the Guardian of the Ga'hoole series. (And the made a movie of it about 5? years ago called the Legends of the Guardians.  I figured if I could get him reading the book, then watch the movie it might help.  I read the first chapter to him and he was hooked but it was taking him FOREVER to get through it.  

Then I remembered that in 2nd grade he loved Jigsaw Jones (an encyclopedia brown wannabe for younger kids) and he had listened to them on CD when he went to bed and loved it. I went to the library and found the CD Audio-book for The Journey.  He put it in his CD player and listened to it while reading the book.  It was AMAZING! He not only FINISHED the book but asked me to get him the second one.  (Library here I come!) 


Since then he has completed reading 4 books in total. He has read a Lego Hero Factory Book (without an audio-book), The Capture by Kathryn Lasky, The Journey by Kathryn Lasky and Diary of a Wimpy Kid #4. The library has audio-books for them.  Its been great.

Apparently now reading only one book at a time is boring.He has started reading 4 others, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Strange Case of Origami Yoda, A Curious Man; The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert "Believe It Or Not" Ripley, and The Bad Beginning.  

SO for everyone that has a kid who doesn't like to read or struggles, try what I did.  It may work, no guarantees, but it can't hurt and I am so happy that now I can share my love of reading with him. He is excited about reading now.  It grabs him and makes him want to read more.  And it only took pairing him and his book up with an audio-book.