Help your child to enjoy reading

Inspire a love of reading

Getting lost in a good book is one of life’s great pleasures and a fantastic way to learn. Here’s our guide to helping your child fall in love with reading.

Getting your child reading

As parents, we all want the best for our children. We know that it’s important to make sure they become confident, fluent readers who love having their nose in a good book. It can just be hard to know where to start. Should you read to your baby? What can you do to familiarise your children with words and reading before school? And how do you help them to progress at school when teaching methods have changed since you learnt to read?

We hope that this guide will help answer some of your questions, as well as give you some advice and inspiration on ways to help your children have fun with reading.

These books are rooted in my own experiences. When helping to oversee a reading group with my eldest child, I realised that sometimes when reading books children would read in a wooden way, and get bored easily when it wasn't their turn. I hit on the idea of writing some very short and simple plays where they could all get involved. It worked a treat. The children loved having a part to read, and they started putting much more expression into the words.

Julia Donaldson, the Children's Laureate 2011-2013