There are several ways that you can encourage your child to make great book choices for themselves, and to be responsible for their learning progress.
Training Your Child To Take Responsibility for Book Choices: Some children are self-directed, voracious readers and always have a pile of books ready to read! Others, while very capable readers, need encouragement and help to make book choices. Whether your challenge is keeping up or giving direction, here are some ideas for conversations you can have with your child to help them learn to make great book choices.
Show by Example: If you have a young child and are determining their book choices, talk to them about your boundaries, what content you feel is appropriate, and why you are suggesting specific books for them to read.
Discuss Specific Boundaries: If your child is older and choosing their own books, ask your child questions to help them determine specific boundaries when they should put a book away. Help them learn to judge for themselves when a book may be too violent, or may include too much maturity in relationships. Discuss what books might be better read during the day rather than just before bedtime. Help them define in their minds the boundaries of their comfort zone.
Discuss Book Choice Strategies: If you have read the articles on book strategies, you may have developed ideas of appropriate strategies for your child. Talk to your child about these approaches. If you want to make it fun, put a form together that they can "fill in" different genres and different areas of book choices. This is a great strategy to encourage variety. The form can be structured as a grid, or unstructured like a picture with puzzle pieces drawn that are colored in for each desired book choice. If you are combining fiction and non-fiction reading, talk to them about what would be good book choices in each area and take them to the library.
Take Your Child to the Library: Ensure that your child has their own library card. Train them how to use their library to full advantage by showing them how to search for books, where different book sections are located, and how to find books (fiction books by author, non-fiction books by number). Continuously add responsibilities for library usage by letting them search for books at home and reserve books for themselves. Make them responsible for tracking due dates.
Help Your Child Define a Goal for Themselves: If a child particularly likes books by a certain author you can suggest that your child set a goal to read all the books by that author.
Taking More Responsibility at School for Reading Skills: Parents and teachers can work together to encourage a child to take more responsibility within a classroom.
Portfolios: Your child can take responsibility to organize a portfolio of their best work, including reading and other school subjects.
Self Assessments: Most teachers are familiar with the concept of rubrics for assessments. Advanced readers can be trained to use rubrics to perform self-assessments of their reading and reading comprehension work.
