Ignite a Love for Reading in Your Child’s day with a Daily Reading Routine!

This reading incentive chart is available (totally free) in the Activity Garden. If you would like access to free activities for your toddler/preschooler from the Activity Garden, click on “Subscribe Here” on the top menu bar and enter your first name and email address! You can also sign up at the end of the blog post!

Want to implement a love for reading into your little one’s daily routine? You’ve come to the right place! In my opinion, reading is one of the most important skills a family can instill in their young ones’ lives. This is because of the many benefits reading provides: exposure to novel vocabulary, sight words, sequencing an order of events, making predictions and inferences, excitement about the storyline, problem-solving situations and more! The list goes on and on! To make it motivating and fun, I’m sharing a “Starry Night Reading Incentive Tracker” with you. Read on to find out more about setting up a reading routine and how you can get your free “Starry Night Reading Incentive Chart!”

Yeah! Sounds great but how do I find the time?

Try reading with your child during everyday tasks. Some families read to their children during bath time. Other families like to set a reading routine in the morning, after lunch, or during snack time. No matter how you do it, the point is to just read with your little ones!

Our family values reading time so much that we set a daily target for accomplishing our reading goal. Our family nightly routine includes reading to our little ones for at least 20-30 minutes before bed. On weekends, I tend to break it up by reading to them for 10-15 minutes before nap time, and 10-15 minutes before bedtime. This reading routine has worked very well for our family. My son is now three so he likes to choose which books he wants to read with me. When we finish reading, he likes to look at books by himself in his bed before he falls asleep for his nap. When he was younger, I would leave books in his crib for him to read. The best part was watching him on the baby monitor! I would see and hear him talking out loud while reading the picture books to himself! It was so adorable!

Do you really stick to this plan every single day?

I will be completely honest, I did my best to stick to this plan every single day when we had our son. There was the rare day, here and there, when we missed our daily reading time. However, it did get harder when we had my daughter. It took me awhile to get back into our reading routine on a consistent daily basis. After a few months, I was able to navigate back into a reading routine and for me, having the reading tracker was helpful to keep the reading routine going strong. It was fun to keep track of our reading time in addition to looking forward to circling the stars to show our efforts! My son enjoyed getting closer to the moon! It’s a win-win for everyone!

I want to read for 30 minutes each day, but right now I’m lucky if we get 10 minutes of reading time three days per week! Any strategies?

Any reading you do with your family needs to be celebrated! The reading incentive tracker is great for building up your goals. For example, if you’re currently reading for 10 minutes a few times per week and want to read for 30 minutes, then start where you are! Start your goal at 10 minutes per day and as you consistently meet that goal, bump it up to 15 minutes until you’re able to consistently meet that goal, and then increase to 20 minutes per day, and so on and so forth! There are title boxes on each page that include the text “Daily Reading Minutes Goal.” You can change your goal at any point in time to meet the unique reading needs of your family!

Tell me more about this reading tracker?

To keep my family and myself accountable to this reading time each day, I created a fun visual for my son! Today, I’m sharing this visual with you. This visual is available (totally free) in the Activity Garden. If you would like access to free activities for your toddler/preschooler from the Activity Garden, you can sign up below:

The contents of this activity, such as text, graphics, images, information, as well as other material and content contained in this activity are for informational purposes only. The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your child’s development.

I’ll take a brief moment to show you how I use this at home with my son!