M

y elder son once played a trick on me when he was four years old. In order to impress me, he asked his nanny to read him a short children's story consisting of four paragraphs several times over and memorized the whole content of the story from start to finish.

One night after I came home from work and finished my dinner, he sat me down with the book in his hand. I looked over his head to follow what he was reading and was amazed to find out that he could really read well.

Fortunately, my wife stepped into the room and saw that his eyes were actually not fixed on the book but were wandering about. He was definitely reciting from memory and not reading the book.

All parents will agree that reading is one of the most important skills that children should have. There is practically no job on this earth that does not involve reading. The problem is how to make our children love reading and develop good reading habits?

Some children are born to become bookworms. There are children who have covered a small reading lamp under the blanket after their bedtime, and continued reading, so that their parents wouldn't see the light from outside the room. But most kids would rather watch TV, play games on the computer and access Facebook rather than read books.

My son has a good habit of waking up early and jumping into the shower every morning. Unfortunately, he does it for the sake of connecting to his friends on Facebook early in the morning. How convenient; early morning in Indonesia is early evening in the US. But I don't want to ban him from using the new technology in the morning; he should be part of the globally interconnected kids from all over the world.

This then leaves only 30 to 40 minutes during the car ride to school for reading. But why should we stay silent in the car for the sake of reading when it is practically the only quality family time we have for the whole day?

Morning is the time when I feel fresh and my two children don't have to worry about their homework, which they completed the night before. It is the best time to discuss what they did the day before with their friends, who cried and for what reason, who fell down and had scratches on their knee, who has a crush on who, or the exciting dissection they performed in the science class.

I just don't have the heart to instill a morning reading habit during the car ride to school.

My son's reading has developed reasonably well, but I know he could have done better. I was so happy when he asked me to buy a Harry Potter book, The Order of the Phoenix, which has around 1,000 pages. Unfortunately, he didn't get beyond the first 30 pages. Once the movie had finished its season, his interests had shifted elsewhere. We ended up donating the book to the school library.

How do you help your children develop good reading habits? Apparently there is no single formula that applies to all cases.

Different teachers and parents use different methods. Some fail and others succeed. What we must understand is that the reading habit is a habit of the heart. It is a habit that you might not be able to develop effectively through individual drilling. Making your children sit and read for one hour every night might not yield sustainable results. It might even make them hate reading.

We need to instill a love of reading. And love cannot be forced upon anyone. But just like love, good reading habits can be nurtured. I know of a few success stories that nurture good reading habits either through incentives, through enactment or through discovery. All accomplishments are based on group activities and not on individual drilling.

The first success story is about a Grade 5 teacher in an international school in Jakarta who introduced the "Pizza Reading Challenge" to make the students in her class read at least 10 books in a term.

How could she make them read 10 books when they could not even finish three books in the previous term? Even if she dangled juicy pizzas fully loaded with extra cheese and sausage in front of them, 10 books were probably five too many.

It sounded like a "mission impossible". Indeed, only three students managed to earn their pizzas, and there was a strict rule that they were not to share their bounty with undeserving classmates.

Surprisingly, in the following term many more students enjoyed their hard earned pizzas and they ate them proudly in front of everybody. It is this sense of competition and the fun of eating the hard earned pizza in front of their peers that drove them to develop good reading habits, without having to resort to a method of individual drilling.

What happened to the Pizza Reading Challenge?

I heard that the teacher had it going for only one year and then put the idea to rest since the students didn't need any more prizes to read 10 books in a term. But she will always be able to pull her system out from the closet whenever she needs some help to instill good reading habits into a new batch of students, although so far there has not been any need to do that. Apparently when the younger students see the older students carry around and read *thick' books, they tend to emulate their habits. The Pizza Reading Challenge has done its job.

The second success story was organized in the library during Book Week, which focused on the works of Roald Dahl, an author who has made an amazing contribution to children's literature with his wonderful and unsentimental stories, full of dark humor, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr Fox, Matilda, The Witches and The BFG.

During the whole week, the students listened to his thoroughly entertaining stories, watched some of them on the small screen, attended the drama club's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory performance, dressed up as a Roald Dahl character, and cooked his recipes such as "Stink Bug eggs", "Willy Wonka chocolates" and "Frobscottle". The group activities of celebrating the works of Roald Dahl made the students want to read more of his stories and the library could not fill the demand for Dahl's books.

Then there was the Grade 4 teacher who introduced "Author of the Month" festivities, starting with R. L. Stine who, as we know, was the highest selling children's author of his time. He has written dozens of horror fiction novels and is the creator of the monstrously successful Goosebumps and Fear Street series, which have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide in 32 languages.

The school library came to the teacher's aid and created a special display that provided information about the author, samples of the book series, and a drawing competition to design a book cover, in order to introduce the students to their special writer. Again, the librarian had to place a new order for more of Stine's books.

I am not saying that we should not teach our children to read individually. My point is that group activities can work wonders in developing good reading habits among our children.