6 Simple Ways to Encourage Elementary Students to Read

I started teaching in elementary schools around 18 years ago. Over that time, there have been changes in students’ enjoyment and methods of reading. I have observed that students talk less about books and more about the games they play at home on devices. Parents ask for help to wean their children off devices so they read books instead. At our school book fairs, the numbers of graphic novels sold are rising. Families are busier, are more stressed, and have less leisure time.

From kindergarten into the upper grades, students spend more time on devices. As a result, I’ve noticed that children are struggling to maintain their attention. To no one’s surprise, national literacy rates and reading scores are in decline. Add in the anxiety and stress that students are feeling, something that is now a common feature of articles in national newspapers.

Despite these challenges, reading is a core life skill for each and every learner, and it’s at the heart of daily learning. The key to this is to empower students to enjoy reading outside of class and form a rewarding habit. What worked for me almost two decades ago isn’t effective now, so I needed to find a new approach. Here are six small ways that I encourage and celebrate reading.

1. Hold The Morning Meeting Over Books

Like many schools, we begin our day with a morning meeting. For my students, this means sharing with different people in class what they read the night before. This allows me to informally monitor if home reading is actually occurring and what books are being read. I track students who don’t bring books and then reach out to their families via the email messaging service on our school’s communication platform.

This activity is revealing, because it raises all of the issues I mentioned earlier, along with some complex family dynamics that arose post-Covid. When I reach out to families, I problem-solve with them—helping them source books or understand that because their child with dyslexia listens to a lot of audiobooks, she can talk about them at our meetings. Families welcome the support and acknowledgment that making time to read can be a challenge, for a variety of reasons.

While I enjoy and value graphic novels, I think that a student who only reads those types of books is perhaps struggling to find a chapter book that they enjoy. This led me to connect families with our librarian, who is great at giving recommendations.

2. Give Certificates for Reading

Our school’s reward certificates are themed around being “caught in the act” of doing something positive. I use the certificate solely for initiative taken at home, which includes any form of learning.

However, the spin on this is that the certificates are dominated by parents “catching” their child independently reading. With their permission, I then share the picture on our class platform (Seesaw), which inspires positive comments from other families who want the same positive attention for their child. This interaction is an effective way to build a classroom culture that values reading.

3. Connect Students With Library Programs

Inspired by our school librarian, I’ve embraced the Oregon Battle of the Books as another way to promote reading. It’s an optional program run through our library, and it starts with third-grade students. I support the program by reading books aloud and focus on the more socially, historically, or linguistically complex books. This helps with comprehension skills and creates a more level playing field for my diverse set of readers. This year, I’ve read the novels Finding Langston, by Lesa Cline-Ransome, and Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhhà Lai.

The first book refers to a boy’s discovery of Langston Hughes’s writing, and I’ve seen students borrow the book from the library to reread it and borrow books of Hughes’s poetry. The second book is a verse novel about a Vietnamese girl and her family, who move to the United States in 1976. A student recently showed me the follow-up book by the same author, When Clouds Touch Us, which I didn’t know about.

4. Offer More Choice in Research Assignments

For part of a class literacy unit, my students read about frogs, research facts, and then write short essays that are four to five paragraphs long. They repeat this process once independently with a different frog choice.

Last year, I had some reluctant readers who asked to research other animals (reptiles, specialized fish, and frogs not included in the curriculum). As these students were all using the same skills and producing work that could be marked using the same criteria, it was easy for me to permit this. One boy brought in books that other students wanted to use, creating genuine excitement about research.

5. Making Phonics and Phonemic Awareness Accessible

In our phonics and spelling program (HD Word +), I have children work together, verbalizing words, studying their meaning, and playing vocabulary and comprehension games to make this curriculum accessible and fun.

We have a weekly benchmark assessment. For those students who don’t make the minimum, I reach out to families and suggest they practice using the decodable story packs that I’ve already sent home. I also make copies of a fluency text pack and send that home. I’ve learned that some of my families need and are grateful to have specific resources at home.

6. Don’t Forget Poetry

If you’ve read my previous articles, you know I’m a poet and love teaching students how to read and write poetry.

In addition to creating class performances of the poems that occasionally pop up in our curriculum, I try to include mini-discussions around short poems that we read together. I recently did this with “Fame is a bee,” a short poem by Emily Dickinson.

The structure of the poem—a good thing about fame / a bad thing about fame / that fame passes—was perfect for helping my students to develop metaphoric thinking skills. What else is fame like? A flower? How? Water? How? While tricky at first, after 15 minutes, the class was buzzing with metaphors.

Making poetry come alive, even briefly, gives students a chance to see themselves as both poets and readers of poetry.

Consider the Future of Reading

There are many questions in education right now around artificial intelligence, the use of devices, and the methods of pedagogical delivery. The answers to them will surely further shape the reading experience for our students. Yet, rather than bemoan the challenges that we face in teaching reading, we have to find ways to keep it present, pertinent, and, most important, fun for everyone.