My favorite strat­e­gy for encour­ag­ing young learn­ers to read is to help them find books that feel com­fort­able for them.

As a librar­i­an, I’ve divid­ed much of our fic­tion into gen­res. This allows read­ers to find sec­tions that align to their interests—nature, sports, etc.

I also strong­ly encour­age series books for read­ers because once they find a series that’s of inter­est and at the right read­ing lev­el, they won’t have anx­i­ety about try­ing to fig­ure out what to read next.

I try to help read­ers under­stand that all kinds of read­ing counts. They can lis­ten to audio­books (hope­ful­ly with a print book so they can fol­low the text), they can read graph­ic nov­els, they can read mag­a­zines, they can read non­fic­tion, etc.

Final­ly, I give them per­mis­sion to “cheat.” I do things like show them verse nov­els and point out how much white space is on the page or demo Choose Your Own Adven­ture books and tell them they don’t have to read the entire book. This gets reluc­tant read­ers excit­ed, and once they start read­ing, they often don’t want to stop!