#HappyHomeschooling – Page 4 – ~Our Holistic Homeschool~

Often as parents, in our very efforts to get our children to become avid readers, we accidentally turn our kids off (sometimes permanently) to reading. We are so determined to get that classic or that great historical autobiography into the hands of our child, that we miss the boat when it comes to first cultivating his budding relationship with reading.

In forcing those “educational” texts too early, we inadvertently teach our children that books are pills to be swallowed (“for your own good!”) rather than a delicious feast to be gazed upon, sampled, and devoured according to one’s own tastes and appetite.

In short, we forget the sugar . . . or the love. We begin restricting our child’s reading diet even before she has begun expanding her palate! Such force-feeding often leads to a bitter experience with the written word—one that can sometimes be hard to turn around.

Toon Books are fabulous early-reading introduction to comics!

And so, here is a friendly little reminder to us all to SIMPLY LET THEM READ. We can slowly expand our children’s tastes in literature, one read-aloud at a time. And so we should! But as we do, we can let those silly series books, magazines, and comic books count! They may seem like fluff literature, but they serve a very crucial role in our children’s reading careers; they are gateway books! They pave the way for a lifetime of literature because they are the books that our children first fall in love with! And love is the foundation of any lifelong relationship.