Finding the right books

Louise has taught primary school children of all ages and is the author of successful resources to help children crack the reading code. Her fiction work includes the best-selling children’s books Harriet Clare, Zac Power Test Drives and Boy vs Beast.

These tips are about choosing books to read for enjoyment. Beginning readers will mostly reading decodable texts for reading practice but once children move beyond that stage we want to encourage them to read a wide range of books.

Louise writes:

So much of reading success is about confidence and enjoyment. If children enjoy reading and feel a sense of success at it then they’ll keep doing it — and when they keep reading, their confidence and reading competency soars.

But, if there are too many hard words, the reader stumbles through the story, continually stopping to tackle tricky words. The attention wanders and before you know it, the book has been put down and the chances of it being picked up again are low.

So, it is absolutely critical that you find the right books for your child – books that will build rather than erode reading confidence. Books that will be enjoyed, not endured. A good book for your child is a book they can read and a book they want to read. But how do you find that?

There are three parts to the perfect-book puzzle: content, readability and the child. If you get these things right, then the rest will follow.

These tips will help you get it right!