Create Family Bonding

You want to create family bonding and grow close as a family. But sometimes it is hard to find the time or money to make it happen; movies are expensive and bring no interaction and traveling is difficult with busy schedules.

But a good book provides bonding both in the moment and for years to come. With a great book, your family travels to distant lands, embraces thrilling adventures, experiences bye-gone eras and exotic cultures without costing you time and money you don’t have. You can read during the lazy hazy days of summer or next to a sizzling fire in the dark of winter.

Some of my warmest childhood memories are of my mom reading books aloud to my sister and me. Snuggled cozily in bed we read Bible storybooks with vivid pictures. We traveled back to the heartland with Little House on the Prairie and felt glad to be going to bed without snow blowing through the cracks of our log cabin.

Reading aloud at home or on long car rides provides delight and entertainment for your whole family. In fact, you give your family a treasure of memories when you aloud.

5 Benefits of Reading Out Loud

Increases Vocabulary

Read books that are too hard for your kids to read, a few grade levels ahead. The new words they hear increases their vocabulary. Kids begin to understand what they mean as words are used in context. As they hear the words, they learn how to pronounce them correctly upon reading them.

A great example of this is Charlotte’s web. This is a wonderful read for elementary children, though the whole family will enjoy well-written children’s literature. When our family reads and encounters a new word, we try to see how many ways we can incorporate it correctly in our conversations throughout the day. It’s a fun bonding activity!

Improves Writing

Listening to good writing creates better writers. Consider the beauty of this paragraph from the book Island Boy by Barbara Cooney.

“When the house had been banked with spruce boughs and the firewood cut for winter, the bitter cold came. Matthias would wake with the tip of his nose like ice. The windowpanes frosted over, and the wind whistled in the chimney. Sea smoke hung over the open water. Then the children would crowd into the steamy kitchen, learning to read and write under Ma’s fierce eye.”

Can you feel the cold, sense the tension, smell the spruce? The more you expose your kids to beautiful descriptions and phrasing, the more equipped they are to write with eloquence and beauty.

Provides Enjoyment

Want to get your heart racing? Diving into a great book full of tension will increase it as your main hero strives to overcome the villain. Will he survive? How will it end? You anxiously turn the pages to find out.

Mrs. Dillon, my third-grade teacher read Island of the Blue Dolphins to our class and she stopped reading at the most action-filled, tense moments. We begged her to move on, to finish the chapter. But in agony, we waited until the next day to cheer on our hero. Story time after lunch was the most enjoyable part of our day. You can build that into your family time.

Promotes Bonding

My husband read The Hobbit by our fire pit one summer as the kids made s’mores and swatted flies. He read Unbroken in the winter months as the kids did crafts by the fireplace. These happy memories put a smile on our faces.

Reading together also creates a common language. You can use one phrase and the whole family immediately comprehends your meaning.

When we read The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, (LLW) signs of spring showed that “Aslan was on the move.” Good was coming to Narnia. We have used that phrase when we see an answer to prayer or signs that God is at work. The phrase paints a picture more powerful than mere words. When we pull phrases like this from a book it bonds us because the phrase is ours and not understood by outsiders who haven’t experienced the adventure with us. 

Prompts Thinking

When we read a book, often I stop to ask, “What do you think will happen next?”. We stop to consider hints foreshadowing what’s to come. We read thinking about the plot, the characters, how they will escape, delighting, or groaning with unexpected plot twists.

We also ponder the choices and actions of the characters. What did that person do? What were the consequences of the action? In LLW, Edmond acts selfishly and puts his siblings in harm’s way. Those discussions provide good thoughts for considering how my selfishness has the potential to harm my family.

In Number the Stars, a Danish family helps their Jewish neighbors escape from Copenhagen, Denmark during WWII. The background of this story provides a great discussion about what it looks like to love your neighbor, display courage, or risk harm for the good of someone else.

We build our own character as look at the strengths and flaws of the characters in our books.

HOW TO GET STARTED READING ALOUD AS A FAMILY

Choose quality literature

Choose books with rich vocabulary, a well-crafted plot line, and characters worth emulating. Some characters serve as examples of how not to live, others are flawed, but grow and transform as the tale unfolds. (List of suggested books).

Consider buying two books:

Honey for a Child’s Heart by Gladys Hunt and Honey for a Teen’s Heart.

This author shares a compelling vision for reading together as a family and provides many book suggestions based on age and genre. Worth the purchase!

Choose a book above the current reading level.

If you have a wide age range of kids, choose a book toward the upper range that would still be appropriate subject matter for the younger kids. Remember, quality children’s literature will be enjoyable even for adults.

Read 20 minutes per day.

Keep it short. Often, right after dinner works well before kids scatter to homework. If you homeschool, after breakfast or after lunch work well too.

Stop reading at an exciting point in the story, even if it is in the middle of a chapter.

This is the best way to get your kids begging you to carve out some time to pick up the book and reengage. I have had to hide the book at these moments so no one snuck a look ahead!

Allow kids to do an activity while you read.

Younger kids may need to play with legos, cars, play-dough, or color while you read. They can play quietly.

Final Thoughts

Reading aloud as a family is worth the effort. Your family will look back over the days you have read together remembering the books you loved, the stories you hated, the characters that enlarged your heart, inspired your soul and carried you to heights of truth, beauty, and goodness.

So, grab a good book and enjoy the adventure of reading aloud.