Stress-Busting Holiday Reading Tips for Families
While the holidays can be stressful and frantic for many moms and dads, spending time reading together is a great reason to turn off the television, cuddle up, and relax.
To make reading a part of your holiday traditions, try some of these fun literacy activities.
Encourage your child to create bookmarks to enclose in a gift book or to mark the place in your own book where you leave off during read-aloud time.
Ask your child to help with holiday shopping. Have him or her write out the list and then read the items aloud as you peruse the aisles together.
Give your child a companion book to traditional holiday gifts, such as a book on juggling and several brightly colored balls; a book about fossils and a bag of plaster of Paris; or a book about stamp collecting and a stamp album.
When it's time for holiday baking, ask your child to read the directions aloud to you. While the cookies are in the oven, read a short book together.
Help your child make his or her own holiday gifts for family and friends by following the directions in a how-to-book.
Ask your child to help you write out gift nametags. Use extra-large gift tags for tiny hands!
Encourage your child to volunteer to read to residents in a local retirement home or hospital.
Give a bookstore gift certificate as a holiday present so your child can select a new book on his or her own. Read the book together.
Visit the library and pick out some holiday favorites for festive family reading all season long.
Adapted from Reading is Fundamental Parent Tips
Give the Gift of Reading: Do a Kids’ Christmas Book Advent Calendar
Those who know me know I’m always on a quest to make sure my son loves books as much as I do. As part of this quest and also to offset the endless array of electronics and video games that always dominate his Christmas list, a couple of years ago I put together a Christmas Book Advent Calendar for him to make sure he gets plenty of reading time throughout the holiday season. Like a traditional advent calendar, mine was comprised of 24 books, one for each of the days leading up to Christmas, and the books were an assortment of traditional classics that were favorites of mine when I was his age, as well as some contemporary stories that are popular now. I also selected some books that were funny, some that were more serious, and I also tried to include a variety of both secular and religious stories. Most of the books I selected could easily be read in a single night, although I did have a couple of longer ones that I assigned to weekend days in case he couldn’t finish them in one night. My son had just turned 7 that year so I, of course, tried to make my selections a mix of books he could read on his own coupled with books his Dad or myself could read to him.
I’m not super creative when it to decorating so my calendar display was pretty basic. I just wrapped each book in festive paper, numbered them 1-24 in the order I wanted them to be opened and read, and then I arranged them in a decorative holiday basket. You can always check out Pinterest for tons of more creative ways to display your calendar.
Cost was, of course, an issue since books are not cheap, but I scored a lot of great deals on Black Friday Weekend, which is why I’m posting this now, and I also picked up a lot of heavily discounted books at our local book fair and of course through Amazon.
I’m happy to say that my son LOVED doing the Advent Calendar. He even got to the point where he would run down first thing every morning to unwrap the day’s book to see what we would be reading that evening. We had a great time with it — lots of laughs at silly books like Jingle Bells, Batman Smells and lots of smiles reading all of the traditional favorites like How the Grinch Stole Christmas. He still has all of the books on his shelf, has already pulled several of them out to re-read again this year, and is currently begging me to do another Advent Calendar this year. I’m not sure I can come up with an age-appropriate list on such short notice, but it does make me smile to know that he enjoyed it that much, considering it’s not an Xbox game, haha.
Anyway, I wanted to pass along the list of books that I used for my Advent Calendar in case there’s anyone else out there who is looking to do something similar for their children. It’s a lot of work to put one together but so totally worth it. Happy Reading and Happy Holidays!
