How do you get your children interested in reading?

Today we made our weekly trip to the library.  We have been going now for about three years to whichever library was closest to wherever we lived.  We always have a huge stash of library books, return about half of them, (the ones that have already been read one too many times,) and then replace them with a pile of books which I had placed on hold the week before.

I love doing holds because we end up with much higher quality books than we do when we just browse and wing it.  Besides, it makes it far less stressful for me; I let the girls sit and look at books and play with toys without any pressure to find so many books before my blood sugar starts giving out on me or C gets lost wandering through the library.

My favorite part of library day usually looks something like this:

It never fails to entirely delight me the way that R can't get enough of all these new books.  She will sit and read for hours the day we restock our library collection.  It's a beautiful thing.  :)

When we first began frequenting the library when R was about one, I began checking out every ABC book they had.  Her attention span was short, but I knew how important it was to read to her every day, so I figured these books were perfect!  She could pay attention to one or two letters per page and be soaking up precious info at the same time.

Little did I know that doing so would result in her knowing all the letter names by the time she was 18 months and all the letter sounds shortly thereafter. She now reads fluently anything she can get her hands on. She is still surprising me though.  Just the other day I discovered that she can read silently and still retain everything!

Needless to say, though I knew there was no guarantee of this miracle working more than once, I decided to give C every chance I gave R, and we have continued checking out all the ABC books.  It turns out that C loves learning her letters too, and knows almost all of them and some of the sounds.  It gives me some degree of confidence that it wasn't just a fluke and that what I am doing matters.

I love reading and knowing that it is foundational to any great education has given me a great deal of motivation to make it a priority in our home.  So we fill our home with books, I read my own books in front of the girls, we let them read or look at books in bed as they fall asleep, we read to them every night, I read classics to them during the day, and we go to the library every week.  ;)