<p>I was taking the books from library. Do not remember though how long that was working. I know that D. read for awhile, but then HS killed it for her. She cannot read anymore for entertainment. She cannot finish even books that she likes. I have been this way myself for several decades. I guess, we are not a family of readers. My H. is an opposite, he can swallow the book in no time (with the great details actually). So, he is not a regular reader either.
I never had an urge of encouraging kids to read. There is no connection between being an avid reader and being a very good writer and a top caliber student. There is a connection between being an avid reader and getting high scores in Verbal / Reading sections of the standardized test. However, at certain point, this section is dropped and then their scores are going up, just as D. discovered after taking her Medical Board tests. As D. is close to her graduation from the Med. School in May of 2015, looking back, her way of slower reading has helped her tremendously in all classes, and her superior writing was also a great positive effect on the grades in every single class. </p>
<p>Darmawheel, social and emotional development is just as important as intellectual development, and middle school is a stage when peers are very, very important. I know people who are permanently scarred from that stage of life. Your daughter does her work and reads for two hours, it is hard to see what the problem is.</p>
<p>Are you worried about SAT scores, vocabularly on standardized tests that kind of thing? Because a happy child is worth quite a few hundred points on a test :)</p>
<p>It sounds like she is using the ipad to socialize with her friends and that you think reading is more important than that. I would try to get her off the ipad and actually seeing those friends in person and doing some fun activities with them. Take away the ipad and invite some of these friends over for arts and crafts or cook something with them or go ice skating, take a ball out on the soccer field, or whatever the kids are into. There’s only so much you can do with people in chat bubbles and another concern much greater than the reading is that she doesn’t actually do anything. </p>
<p>And again, two hours of reading every night is plenty. My daughters’ friends are nearly all honors students and I cannot think of a single one of them whose parents made them read for even two hours every night. Not one. Of course many of them are readers by choice, but some are not. I’m not sure why you think it’s so much more important for her to read about fictional people than to interact with real people doing real things. Yes, there is an interest in developing her literacy skills but two hours per day is plenty for that. </p>
<p>Also, why does she stay up so late? My kids were going to sleep at 9 at that age, and their school didn’t start particularly early. Perhaps being chronically sleep-deprived is weakening her self-control and leading to these tantrums when you upset her.</p>
<p>Just wanted to add what activities is she in? Maybe some more structure and organized development of interests would help. Middle school is a good time to explore and develop interests. Our middle school has clubs for things like the school newscast, filmmaking, math, art, jazz band, choir, robotics, as well as some after school sports, and many of the kids are also active outside of school in sports, church groups, theater, music groups, girl scouts, etc.</p>
<p>Speaking as staff in a school library, I can tell you no person on earth has a sustainable reading habit unless and until they are reading stuff they love. The trick, of course, is helping her figure out what that is. Like everything else, it takes practice. But teens love autonomy, and book choices are a harmless way to exercise that. Use it to your advantage!</p>
<p>“Classics” have no inherent value over modern lit. Newspapers, magazines, bestsellers and websites are just as valid intellectually. I do agree she is on the iPad a lot. Rather than negotiate, our family approach was to have electronics-free days (typically it was Sunday) and a definite limit to daily screen time. They could use it all at once, or in increments, but it was not negotiable. I think it would be okay to forbid it to leave the house unless she needs it for school or is on a long trip. Be firm, be dispassionate, be immune to temper tantrums. You can’t send her out in the world thinking she can live successfully buried in an iPad OR that whining and crying is a problem-solving strategy.These, to me, are issues apart from reading. </p>
<p>So, my suggestion is to try a library date once a week. Take her to the library for a set amount of time – 30 minutes is good, then out for coffee or snacks. Expect that she won’t like it at first. Ignore that. Keep doing it, and eventually she’ll find something worth reading. You, yourself, will need to check out an armload of books – emphasize the “what the heck, I thought I’d try it” nature of some choices." And get a bunch. Get a few she might like. Leave them around for the week, then do it again and again and again. Buy her magazine subscriptions that advance her interests or career tracks…</p>
<p>I think it has to do with the reading material. My younger DD was not much of a reader (but did fine in school) until her wonderful 5th grade teacher turned her on to The City of Ember. </p>
<p>Instead of “you can do ipad for an hour” how about “after you read, you can have the ipad for an hour”</p>
<p>My 6th grader loves that Heroes of Olympus Series! </p>
<p>I agree that at this stage it is most important to develop a love of reading, and the only way to do that is to let them read what they like. I try to fit in a “classic” here and there. It helps that I have two giant bookshelves full of them (my Saturday morning yard sale/thrift store compulsion).</p>
<p>Maybe she needs to watch some movies based on the books to spark her interest first?</p>
<p>Thank you all for contributing. CC is so valuable in showing you things that are so right in front of your nose that you don’t see them. I didn’t realize–now I do–what an extremely social girl DD3 is and how she thrives on communicating with her friends. At the end of the year awards thing they have in school she won “good citizenship”–I don’t know what she did to exhibit “citizenship” in 5th grade–but I think the teachers making this evaluation saw how outgoing and cooperative she was. Last yr, I got an email from her social studies teacher saying, I just want you to know–in a group activity today, DD3 saw that one student wasn’t “getting it” and she stopped the group and personally explained and caught that individual up. She is a very observant and helpful girl. I had never gotten an "out of the blue"email about any of the three girls before. Following your comments, now I appreciate this teacher’s remarks even more.</p>
<p>As for face to face playtime, she was at a friend’s yesterday (the school had a half day) and has a playdate or sleepover every weekend, very different from DD1 (who was very social–at her 5th grade ceremony she also won the Good Citizenship Prize and the teacher, before she named her, said This is a girl who will never meet a person she doesn’t like: DD1. And this is true of her. But fewer playdates and NO ipad and much more reading. Amazingly, DD2 was an introvert from grades 7-10 and has blossomed socially. Had a party over of about ten girls and boys on Saturday. </p>
<p>Compmom’s first sentence caught my flaw. I was not recognizing my DD3s special talents and interests, and yes, she does read at bedtime (10:30 lights out because she shares room with DD2 who is 16–DD3 is a bundle of energy and is not sleep-deprived and in fact I have told her pediatrician. She gets exactly 8 hours of sleep.)</p>
<p>Still, in my heart, I feel there is “something” she is missing by not reading more. I want our exhuberant, book loving children’s librarian to talk to her, just for a few minutes, and help her choose to pick out some books to read. Greenbutton is exactly right that we need a weekly trip to the library and to borrow at least one (or two? I’ll ask the children’s librarian what she thinks) books. This is what I said in my first post about our scheduled talk with the librarian on Tues. But first, thank you for opening my mind and teaching me a lot.</p>
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<p>I know that all libraries are different, however be on the lookout for events put on by your public library. I remember that mine had an incentive program/contest for students in the summer. You would log what books you read, and there were prizes. Also, reading habits can vary as students get older. My sister refused to read at a younger age, but the second she picked up the “Twilight” books, she couldn’t stop reading. She has been a consistent reader ever since. </p>
<p>I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I really do believe that reading can help increase writing, vocabulary skills, etc. If not increase it, reading helps keep kids exposed to the wide variety of words in the english language, which will keep those skills sharp. </p>
<p>Also be aware that middle school is a stage when they want us to stay in the car!! They like to pretend they don’t have parents. A few years later, we can exist again :)</p>
<p>I would also like to point out that many of us spend a good deal of time on CC. At least your daughter knows the kids she is communicating online with!!!</p>
<p>@Dharmawheel If you are an introvert, you may have enjoyed the company of books as a child. If your daughter is an extrovert, she gets her energy from other people. Neither is better, just different.</p>
<p>Our S1 is not a huge reader but still scored nearly 2300 SAT, working on 4th language, 12 APs (all 5s and 4s so far). He’s had a lot of computer time - perhaps too much. But he’s worked his butt off and he has a couple of academic passions (computer programming and foreign language). Maybe he’ll get to reading literature outside of his AP Lit course at a later stage in life.</p>
<p>Our approach to encouraging the kids to read – other than teaching them to read phonetically before they reached Kindergarten – was to let them read anything they wanted to. For our son, that was sports, including the newspapers, books, magazines, whatEVER. He was fascinated by sports and by numbers. He didn’t need encouragement, but learned to read the sports pages in the newspaper after his favorite team started winning big when he was age 6. Of course, we also read to him as a young child, the usual panoply of classics (Babar, etc.) as well as books he could read himself (Arnold Lobel, etc.). Later on, we weren’t concerned about his reading “literature” for personal enjoyment. He got plenty of that through school, and besides had enough to do.</p>
<p>With our younger one, we didn’t care what she read, but she liked all kinds of things – standard children’s literature – until she was in 4th grade (when I was on sabbatical leave in California) and the teachers there made reading, spelling, etc., into an exercise into a “left-brained” exercise of puzzles, etc. She was discouraged from reading for pleasure, and that affected her for years! </p>
<p>So I say this: let them read ANYTHING. If they are reading something, and are good readers, don’t fret. Encourage them.</p>
<p>If you can find a librarian who can expand her reading that would be great. I used to take my kids to the library in the next town over because the librarian there was so enthusiastic about sci fi and fantasy. She was able to make all sorts of suggestions for my kids. A lot of sci fi and fantasy is actually written at a pretty advanced level, and my younger son who got some sort of geography prize in middle school swears he learned all the geography terms (penninsula, archipelago, isthmuth etc by reading fantasy novels and playing computer games.) Kids who read a lot tend to write well because they know what good writing sounds like.</p>
<p>Good science fiction is good literature. It’s not always well-written (and neither is all good literature – ideas and imagination matter, too), but some of it is also beautifully written.</p>
<p>I, too, had one child who read everything, voraciously, from crappy YA series to classic literature, and another who really only liked science fiction and mysteries. But liking science fiction and mysteries also lead to liking books about science, and about the ideas in science, and references to other literature in science fiction led him to explore that, too, ultimately. (And a little idiosyncratically. He has read all of Thomas Pynchon, Haruki Murakami, and Salman Rushdie.) Now, at 25, he does not have his sibling’s comprehensive knowledge of Euro-American literature of the past 300 years, but he reads all the time, can discuss literature intelligently, and it serves all the purposed it’s supposed to serve for him.</p>
<p>Try Ursula K. LeGuin – she’s both an excellent writer and an excellent thinker, and she has books that are written primarily for teenagers (the Earthsea books, among others) and books that are more sophisticated, in both ideas and in form, but the transition from one set to the other is very natural. My favorites are The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and Always Coming Home. LeGuin is also good because she plays with the line between science fiction and fantasy. I don’t know the Percy Jackson books well enough to know whether a girl who likes them would really move to science fiction, or more towards fantasy.</p>
<p>For science fiction, I also like Philip K. Dick a lot, and he’s a good first step because his books are short with simple but really effective ideas. And Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. My son also loved William Gibson, Orson Scott Card, Terry Pratchett (somewhat more humorous), Douglas Adams (also humorous), Neil Gaiman (an excellent gateway drug to more conventional literature), Robert Heinlein, Kage Baker, and lots of Japanese manga like Akira and Ghost In The Machine.</p>
<p>For fantasy, she could move towards Marian Zimmer Bradley and Mary Renault, which open up a lot of world literature. </p>
<p>Oh for heavens sake. She “snuck away” with the IPad? Get it back. iPads have a password. Change it and do not tell your daughter the new password. </p>
<p>My kids both read at night…and for about the same duration and also as late. This was their pleasure reading time…and they both loved doing it. Books were of their choosing, not mine. </p>
<p>2 hours of reading every day is way too much. It takes life out of balance. the kids are usually so busy with all kind of ECs at this age. If they have fun with reading, it is OK.<br>
I would object to that much reading though. I would want my kid to be involved at school, spend time with friends, do sports, music, art…etc. And if you want them to be a good writer, then thay have to spend time writing outside of school homework.
It is strange that people pushing kids to read, but nobody cares to push them to write. </p>
<p>I am surprised that so many believe that the primary purpose of reading is to score well in SAT. SAT is an easy exam. A complete non reader whose first language is not English can do very well in SAT through test prep. The point of reading is to be educated. I. My experience, the stuff taught in school is not what I would consider as an well rounded education in literature. At least in my kid’s school, there are too many pointless books that aim to teach race relations and such, which is definitely not the mark of good literature. I also don’t think sci fi is something that one should read for the purpose of being educated. It’s ok to read that for fun. For my kid at least I made a list that needs to be read, some Naipaul, some Grass, some Camus, some Calvino, some Llosa, some Oe, and of course Roth, and Bellow, and Keruac, and … This is to become educated. This is not about reading for fun, it’s like PE for the culture part of huge brain. One may say that I am forcing this and it will lapse the moment I stop forcing, but hey, On The Road can’t be unread once it is read already hahaha. The way I make the reading happen is through bribes. To buy one more classical music score book one more book from the book list has to be read. Works like a charm. I love bribes!!</p>
<p>In the 19th century parents tried to limit reading of novels the same way we limited tv and later technology for kids. Interesting to think about.</p>
<p>Hell froze over. I agree with post 36.</p>