Paper-start reading – a joyful experience

Nabanita Deshmukh

In this digital age, reading has become quite a challenge. “But our kids read all the time!” insist some parents. “Do they really? Or is it just the textbook lessons they devour to pass a test, but never a story book?” Contrary to what many parents and some teachers believe, textbook reading is never enough to develop competent readers. It is merely a small part in the large graph of reading competency and rarely an end by itself. Something else needs to come in and that something is a start-up approach to joyful reading which is sadly absent in many schools.

Joyful reading unfortunately is a lost art, but does it really count? It does, even though most teachers struggle to use it in class and there are many reasons for this lapse. There is always ‘that portion’ to finish before the exams, a lack of expertise on how to make joyful reading a part of class routine and finally a reluctance to try something new.

Joyful reading exercises may be difficult to incorporate into the class syllabus but it is by no means impossible. All that a teacher needs is enthusiasm, creativity and a different approach to teaching that will start children off on an exciting journey – a journey that will transform them into confident readers. This can be made possible not by purchasing expensive books but by using low-cost resources such as the humble newspaper, the discarded magazine or that torn storybook page.

Below is a list of start-up activities to make joyful reading a part of children’s learning mode!

Snake reading strips
Materials required: Story page, scissors, transparent tumbler.

Choose a story from an old magazine and cut out a few sentence strips. Twist the strips and roll them gently. Get a transparent plastic tumbler and insert a strip into it. Ask a student to read the sentence through the transparent tumbler. Continue the activity by inserting a few more strips into the tumbler one after the other and ask a few more students to read.

Reading brick
Materials required: Story page, scissors, hollow brick.

Get a hollow brick or any brick with holes in it. Cut out sentence strips from a children’s magazine or the newspaper. Slip it into a hole in the brick and pull it out from another one and watch children read with enthusiasm by anticipating the flow of words as the sentence strip is pulled out slowly.

Reading cone
Materials required: Story page, mirror.

Choose a children’s story page from a newspaper. Roll it into a cone, keep a small hole at the top to peep in. Get a small mirror and place it at the base of the cone. Encourage students to peep in through the hole and read the text that is reflected onto the mirror with added vigour.

Crumpled newspaper ball
Materials required: A story page.

Use an interesting story page from an old or discarded children’s magazine or newspaper. Crumple the page into a ball and hold it in your hand. Call a student and encourage him/her to read whatever he/she can see on the ball and ask him/her to guess what the story is about. For example, ask about the names of characters and their physical or psychological traits (proper nouns, simple adjectives), the types of work or movements they do (action words, name of profession), important events (birthday, marriage, death, accident), time and weather (night, daytime, evening, cloudy, sunny, rainy). Once the guess work is done, open the crumpled page and read out the story to the entire class or if the school has ordered multiple copies of the children’s magazine or newspaper from where the page was taken, distribute them to the class and let the students read out the story.

Reading fan
Materials required: Story page.

Cut out a story or poem from a newspaper or magazine and fold it to create an origami fan. Hand the fan to a student. Ask him/her to read as many sentences as he/she can clearly see, without unfolding the fan and set a time limit for the activity. Open out the fan, once the time is up and then read out the story or poem to the whole class or ask a student to do it.

The reading origami game
Materials required: Story page, scissors, sketch pens.

Take a square sheet of plain paper and make an origami fortune teller out of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAhiIlTxUYA). Once done, cut out words from a story or poem from a children’s magazine and paste them on the folded squares of the paper fortune teller. Call students to your side and begin playing the paper fortune teller game by moving your fingers quickly and ask students to read the words pasted on the outer squares. After reading the words, the students have to spell them out. After the first round, students proceed to the next stage until the last paper fold is opened and new words are revealed like in a treasure hunt.

Reading rockets
Materials required: Story pages.

Choose several story pages from discarded story books. Distribute them to your class and ask the students to make origami rockets out of them. Once the rockets are made, ask a child to stand up and throw his/her rocket towards a classmate. The child on whom it lands has to open the rocket folds and read out the first few lines on the page. The rocket activity can continue thus by involving other students of the class.

Joyful reading journey
The activities described in this article are designed to give children a boost for taking up joyful reading seriously but are in no means the end of a process. On the contrary, they need to be continued and sustained. What is required are follow-up exercises where teachers start off their students on longer and graded reading assignments and assess them periodically to find out whether their reading is improving. Creative activities by using exciting texts from magazines, newspapers or old storybooks will go a long way in instilling the love of books in young children and will sustain them in their journey into adolescence and beyond.

The author is a teacher, teacher educator and a writer of children’s stories and poems. She can be reached at deshmukh.nitu@gmail.com.