Eyesight and learning disorder testing do sound like good ideas.
How about just reading half of a story and leaving the rest for tomorrow? Maybe the suspense will motivate him to try to read the story on his own.
How about having him read to you? Some of my earliest memories are sitting at the kitchen table reading aloud to my grandmother as she worked. OK they were Harlequin romances, but it was reading! (And I still adore Betty Neels.)
My brother had trouble with reading when he was a kid (and took it out on me since I learned to read almost instantaneously). He turned out to be midly dyslexic.
I’ve heard over and over that young boys usually don’t like fiction. They crave non-fiction and learning about the world. You might try some history or science books. Magnetism was a popular topic for my brother and I growing up.
Turn on the closed captioning on your television set and leave it on. There have been some good studies showing that it helps word association and increases learning rates.
A friend of mine took it a step farther. Her kids were allowed to watch one hour a day of TV with the sound on, and as much as they wanted with the sound turned off. They could still watch Two Stupid Dogs (or whatever), but they had to READ the dialog.
I think that’s an overly broad statement; certainly, as a child, I liked not only reading fiction but creating my own. Nonetheless, you might try alternating fiction with nonfiction, like science, sports, nature, history, or whatever else he might be interested in.
I’ll also throw in on the advice to see about having him tested for dyslexia, eyesight problems, and Attention Deficit Disorder. Any one of those–or a combination thereof–could be responsible for his lack of interest in reading, and all are going to cause any attempt to force him to read to be an exercise in futility.
Stranger
Ooooo, now that is smart.
Not much to add here, except to third, fourth, and fifth the suggestions to let the kid pick whatever he wants to read, and encourage him to do so. I regularly go to the bookstore with my son and give him free rein to choose whatever books he wants to buy; the last trip, we ended up with the first <i>Captain Underpants</i> book, even though it’s two years above his reading level, just because he heard it was really funny. I draw the line at those push-a-button-to-make-a-noise books, but only because I can’t stand the din. 
My son got those as soon as he hit Kindergarden. Considering the low prices for the books, and the benefits they confer, I will gladly fork over the money to Scholastic.
Keep reading out loud to him.
There are books that come with a cassette tape that reads the book out loud, and beeps when it’s time to turn the page. Some children like these.
Reward him for general good behavior by giving him a trip to the bookstore where he can choose his own books.
He may prefer books like guidebooks that have a lot of pictures and don’t have to be read in sequence all the way through. There are lots of books like this about Star Wars characters, etc.
Turn on the closed captions on the TV. This will convey to him that all speeh can be expressed in writing. he may also start to subconsciously read some of the captions.
Get the school system to test him for reading disabilities and/or offer him extra help from the reading specialist.
Does he play any video games complex enough to have strategy guides? A strategy guide for a game he enjoys might interest him in reading. And they do tend to have a lot of pictures and aren’t intended to be read in sequence all the way through.
Re: Scholastic Press.
My original comment was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. I’ve worked with many parents over the years, and they’re always bringing sigh-up sheets to sell stuff for their kids. The joke is that the SP do tend to push their products pretty hard, and even as a kid I felt ‘pressured’ to buy.
But as I said, I’m a reader. I would have wanted the books anyway. And SP does help develop a thirst for reading among children, which is a good thing.
My humour varies from wacky to arid, and it sometimes seeps unbidden into serious conversations.
Early childhood educator chiming in.
As someone who frequently watches TV with the closed captioning on and sometimes with the sound off, I have my doubts whether this is an effective reading prescriptive recommendation for a 3rd grader reading currently below grade level. While well meaning, and a good skill for students who are already at or above grade level, have my doubts that it will help a student who stuggles with reading. A child’s frustration level is something you need to be aware of and the crying is definitely indicative of that. Also, when the sound is turned off, a naive reader will not make associations with written words/spoken words; CC-ing still tends to edit dialogue to give approximations only; the child will probably get frustrated with the speed of the all-caps dialogue zipping by on screen; and TV dialogue would likely be at a grade level around the 5th-6th grade level in terms of vocabulary and sentence construction. I personally would not recommend this for the OP’s grandchild. Instead:
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Get his eyes checked for visual acuity and make certain this is not a seeing problem. If so, get it corrected.
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Visit the school in person and find out from the school secretary how the child tested on grade level reading tests last year and whether grade level sight vocabulary words were mastered.
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See if there’s a tutoring agency in your area where a reading diagnostician would be willing to administer reading tests and to test for dyslexia.
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On your own: buy a deck of blank index cards. If you have very good manual penmanship, copy these Dolch Sight Vocabulary words for kindergarten, 1st graders, 2nd graders and 3rd graders to test for yourself your grandchild’s accuracy reading words below, at and above current grade level. Have your grandchild read them until accuracy is at 100% per grade level and the words can be read in under, say 90 seconds.
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I cannot stress this enough: Phonics, phonics, phonics. Granted, they’ll (temporarily) wreck your child’s ability to spell, but most phonics programs will give them the skills to sound out unfamiliar words.
Other recommedations about choosing material your grandchild will be interested in reading (non-fiction especially), having your grandchild see you reading, reading to your grandchild and trips to bookstores and libraries are all standard.
Me, I loved superheroes, I loved to draw and I loved comic books. Find a store in your area that sells comics from qhat retailers call the “quarter bins” and find some age appropriate material.
Some excellent points. I wouldn’t recommend the CC-on, sound-off approach until the child has already started developing their skills. The captioning of adult programming is not supposed to be edited, although a number of captioning firms do so. There is a strong trend away from all-caps in captioning. We were saddled with it primarily because of the earliest caption decoders, which had no descenders in their fonts so the lowercase text looked awful. More and more firms are moving toward mixed-case captions, which will help a lot.
I still feel, however, that having the captions AND sound on will help with word association, especially with non-live programming, where the synchronization of the text and sound is better. Even where the captioner does some editing, the majority of the words are the same.
Let him read anything he wants. You don’t have to make him read books. Comics, magazines, lists of cheat codes for video games, online stuff, anything that’s written is reading.
Reading is fun. Don’t make it into a chore for him–then he’ll never like it.
Yes! Vision is something that is often soooo easy to correct, but problems are not always caught. This can severely screw up someone’s ability to read. Along with long (far?)- sightedness, there are many other issues that kids can have with their eyes, like tracking issues. My mother tutors students who have trouble reading, and nearly every single one of them has had tracking issues. The sad thing is that no one ever noticed. The schools just said the kids were stupid and left them to rot in special ed classes. Please make sure he has had a thorough eye exam.
As for getting him interested in reading, my parents bribed me. It was probably unnecessary (I think I would have read a lot anyway), but I got a prize after every book (or something like that), and a bigger prize after some larger amount of books.
Also, my parents read to us nearly every night. This started before we could talk and ended long after my little sister and I could read on our own.
Moved to IMHO.
-xash
General Questions Moderator
I was hoping this’d be moved so I could say what about bribing him?
Ouch, stop throwing things!!
The Pizza-Hut “Book-It” program and summer library programs reward kids for reading, why not make your own program?
Draw up a bingo card using categories like 2 chapters (of a big kid non-picture book), 1 magazine article, 1 comic book, 1 audio book, Sunday comics, 30 minutes on an approved website, etc. Figure out a prize system, and let him work toward filling in the bingo card himself, with regularly scheduled library visits to find material. Being able to pick and choose which way to bingo and hence which types of assignments should help with his frustration level, and feeling in control goes a long way at that age. Having a variety to pick from should make it less like work, if he feels like he’s cheating by reading the comics, great, he’s still reading!
Stuff like this Spiderman joke book interested my son at that age, any comic book or graphic novels of movies he’s already familiar with were good too.
OK, let me begin that I’m answering the OP directly… I haven’t checked what’s in between.
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Do not try to force the kid. You don’t want him to see reading as a chore.
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Read to him, leave books and comics around.
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Do not try to force the kid.
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Check out his eyesight.
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Do not try to force the kid.
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Remember that people learn different things at different speeds. I taught myself to read before being 3, one of my cousins didn’t figure out d from p until he was 10, we both read just fine now.
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Do not try to force the kid.
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Check for dyslexia.
And in case I forgot, do not try to force the kid.
At home we’re all avid readers. It didn’t use to be so, though: my youngest brother saw books as his personal enemy. Often he’d come up to one of us and say “I’m bored, entertain me!” and we’d reply “I’m reading, entertain yourself!”, so he hated books. He could read, he just refused to. He didn’t even read comic books: he just looked at the pictures. His memory was good enough to remember most stuff just from class and exercises, so he didn’t even need to study much; if he had to write an essay about a book, he would wait until one of his friends had read it and then get the friend to tell him enough of the story to do the essay. This lasted until he was 15.
I’d got my brothers into RP games (the dice and paper kind, this was way before Magic cards) when this youngest one was 10. And lately we’d moved from DnD to LoTR, so there were all these references to the books. Every time he complained that he didn’t understand something, the reply (both from us and from our friends) was “the book’s at home, just read it!” One day he finally did. So the first book my brother read was over 1000 pages, not bad.
Wow, there’s a lot of good advice in this thread! I’ll add my two cents:
Listen to audiobooks in the car. It worked wonders on my kids and kept the backseat fighting to a minimum. I liked it too. It won’t teach him to read, but with luck, he can hold on to the joy of reading until he’s better able to do it on his own. Best of luck to you, jebert.
Don’t give up–all good advice here, but also, keep at it.
My boys liked the almanacs about weather and dinosaurs and how things work. I also exposed them to the wonders of fiction. Alot of it is exposure and immersion. Ditto the eye exams and the testing.
NEVER make something else contingent on reading–surefire way to make reading hated. More flies with honey than vinegar and all that.
Have you tried going thru the newspaper with him? Sharing stories that interest you both? What about mags? How about letters? or emails? Reading is reading. My eldest son loves Foxtrot comic collections as well as Calvin and Hobbes etc–I let him read those–whatever he wants to check out from the library is fine by me. If he had gone on forever with the comic books, I would have suggested other things, but I would not have stopped the comics. As it is, he reads all manner of stuff now.
Good luck!