Vocabulary Meets Fear Factor: How to Inspire Your Child to Read

My 8 year old loves to read. Love. Love. Love. She buys a book and reads it in the car, in the bathroom, in the bed, until she has read it cover to cover. She reads so much, and we borrow so many library books, that mom and dad have racked up
hundreds of dollars in fines for forgetting to return them.

My 5 year old, not so much. We KNOW she knows how to read even though she is still learning. She’s just really lazy about it. She still wants us to read to her. She doesn’t want to read herself. How do you get a kid to read when they’re being lazy about it.

How do you FORCE them to become better readers without making it feel like work?

One day we were walking around the supermarket and it clicked. Pigs Feet. Yep. Pigs Feet. Sorry, but they look disgusting. They’re all in a jar and gelatinous and looking gross. If you like to eat them, I apologize. For me… They just look gross. But it was those Pigs Feet which led to a moment of brilliance with the kids. “Read It, or Eat It” was born.

Yep, the rules are pretty simple. You read the jar, or we’ll threaten you with having to eat the contents.

Our 5 year old knew the jar looked gross – but what was inside? She sounded out the words… “Pigggs…. F…eeee…T. "Ohhhh Grosss!!!!”. And the girls both busted out laughing. She read the jar and had escaped the consequences. (Even if the consequence is merely a pretend threat!)

We tried it with sardines, and clams in tomato juice, and anything else that the kids might find disgusting. Yesterday we were in the store and walked by the butcher section and saw the perfect sign for a good game of “Read It or Eat It”. There in the butcher case was a sign that said “Smoked Pork Butt”. I have the humor level of a little kid. I don’t care what type of meat it is. They had me at Butt. The kids laughed and laughed and sounded it out. They escaped the food fate of eating Butt.

So maybe we’ve stumbled onto something. It’s like Fear Factor meets vocabulary tests. The next time you go to the grocery store with your lazy reader, go down the aisles with the nastiest concoctions.

Next time maybe we’ll try Blood Pudding or Tongue or Fish Heads. If you actually like those foods, you have my condolences, but you can pick others. The imagined fear is what makes it fun. That, and the moment when they sounded out the word and have that eureka moment of disgusting recognition.

Tell me, do you have any creative ways you’ve gotten your kids to enjoy reading?

Pete Wilgoren is an Emmy award winning journalist who writes about his often surprising, embarrassing, and educational experiences surrounded by a wife and two little girls. Find Dadmissions on Facebook and on his blog Dadmissions.