My six-year old niece loves the Little House in the Prarie books- and she watches the show, too. My daughter was a reluctant reader too, but loved the Judy Moody books
+1 for Babymouse graphic novels recommended by @maya54.
Also, if your daughter likes realistic stories and animals, check out the Critter Club series.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B00TQVZUQ8
I’m including a link to the Scholastic Branches series I suggested earlier. Owl Diaries is an extremely popular series at my 2 primary school libraries. We can’t keep them on the shelf. We had a 3rd grade reluctant reader who really took off after devouring them.
http://www.scholastic.com/branches/
Love babymouse!
I’m also all for whatever they want to read. If it happens to be.
Also FUN! I know that people mean well by saying : exchange x number of minutes of reading for x minutes of screen time but tactics like that make it a chore and she will never love it IMO.
Maybe use books as a way to make other more boring activities more exciting. For example, if she’s in the car or on a bus, she can read or listen to a book. When we were on the subway or when I would get my child out to walk (we live in a city with lots of walking) I would carry a book and we would read it to each other. We got through Alice and Wonderland this way. We still read to each other on Sunday mornings even though this child is an adult. True Story. Mainly because it’s a comforting thing to do based on earlier experienc.
Have you tried the Billy and Blaze books? They are stories about a boy and his horse. Just sweet stories. We loved them.
Maybe your daughter is a non-fiction type? My daughter loved books about “real” people – she was fascinated by a series of books with photographs called A Very Young Dancer, A Very Young Rider, A Very Young Gymnast, etc.
@gallentjill - IMO, it’s not an either/or proposition between reading herself and being read to. Both should be happening. The student should read at her skill level and the parent should read aloud to the student above their skill level. I agree with the suggestion for non-fiction.
Focus on the Family has an audio version of the Chronicles of Narnia - it’s an excellent series - more like radio theater than audio books. Highly engaging and great for listening to in the car on road trips. I imagine there are other resources that are more like radio theater as opposed to audio books.
Good luck!
Also, does she struggle with reading or is she just reluctant to read? Perhaps there is an underlying issue?
Tough nut to crack… I was blessed with two voracious readers - probably driven by them just loving ‘stories’ -but finding stories in her genre at 7ish years was critical for my younger kid That’s when she asked me where all the adventure books about girls were, and I was able to introduce her to Tamora Pierce, specifically the ‘Protector of the Small’ series. She grew from there, even reading the entire Harry Potter series on her own during the following year - despite that fact that he’s not a girl, lol.
She also had a quirk, which she eventually overcame, where her innate sense of rhythm got in the way of she herself reading… When presented with a book that used rhythm/rhyme cues to supposedly help the reader, she absolutely froze if they were approximate - words that she read without issue a page earlier she literally could not read if the line didn’t quite fit the established pattern. Her brain went into overdrive and froze. It’s unlikely that OPs kid would have this issue from what has been described, but I mention it just a point out that these differences can exist. They may not be established learning differences, but identifying/addressing them can make all the difference for a kid. (For the record, she thrived on AP Lit and to this day finds “music” everywhere)
My daughter who did audio books had the hard print book to read along, and she did. It drove me crazy because books on tape are really really slow, but it worked for her.