My nephew has been baulking over reading 2-3 pages of Harry Potter per day. Standard sized print. He’s 9 later this month. At that age, you’d have been hard pushed to stop me reading 2-3 chapters; likewise both his parents.
Is this a normal childish whine, are we expecting too much, or is there something amiss?
Some people aren’t that good at reading, but I suspect he just has good taste in literature.
The books aren’t really that interesting reading to me, either, and I love reading. I’ve always felt that people who “hate reading” just haven’t found something they really like to read yet. Why does he have to read HP? Who is making him read it? Does he read anything else, or does he whine about reading everything.
FTR, I know the books are for kids, so they get long-winded and annoying at times, playing up the foibles of teenage kids. Maybe he’s just not interested in that stuff at age 9.
If it’s the first HP book, I feel for the kid. The first few chapters are rough going, even for adult readers; I almost gave up on it and I was 22, not 9. It takes slogging through the first 50 pages before anything interesting actually happens.
Not every kid loves HP. Boys, in particular, often love non-fiction and would prefer to leave fiction on the shelves. Give him a variety to choose from, and include books about tanks in the pile.
Has he ever had his vision tested? By age 9 he should have had at least one good eye exam (and I do not mean a school one; they often miss huge issues). If he continues to have trouble with reading, it’s quite likely to be an eye problem. Irlen lenses are worth trying out.
I could not read fiction as a kid, and I still can’t.
In fact I don’t really like to read anything that isn’t historical or newsworthy. This doesn’t mean I don’t read, but I have very little interest in fiction. If I’m going to devote time to reading, it had better be informative: all fiction is boring for me.
Maybe he’s the same.
It could be that he doesn’t like reading, or that he doesn’t like Harry Potter. Both my siblings HATED to read as kids, but they enjoy it as adults. Interestingly, they both seem to prefer non-fiction.
Is this a school assignment? Why on Earth would you push a kid to read light entertainment like Harry Potter?
My nephew is 11 and we’re hearing the same reports - he just doesn’t want to read. They’ve tried all kinds of different reading material, and what he wants to do is socialize and do other stuff. It happens. It makes me a little sad since his education is all going to be more difficult if he isn’t a good reader (and he isn’t - because he doesn’t practice, he struggles with it), but I don’t think there’s much you can do.
When our son was 9 he did not want to read fiction at all. I even bought him comic books, hoping to get him to read that way but he just wasn’t interested.
Around that age I bought him The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty and he didn’t put that down until he’d read it cover to cover. Then we got him a copy of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and The Guinness Book of World Records and he read those quite happily.
Try some non-fiction and see if he likes that.
I’ve got another non-reading 9 year old boy here. He will occasionally find something that he’s willing to read, but not often. He is more likely to read non-fiction on his own, I think, especially biographies. However, he still really likes to be read to. In the past year, I’ve read all of the How to Train Your Dragon books, Stuart Little, a couple of the Great Brain books, some Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume. He likes the stories, he just doesn’t like to read them himself. I’ve had a few talks with his teachers who assure me that he does read on grade level. It is more than a little frustrating, though, because his father and an I both love to read.
My nephew is quite the HP fan. I forget which book he’s reading, but I don’t think it’s the first.
Aside from the HP book, do you have any other indications of a reading problem? Or are you just mystified by a 9 year old boy who isn’t interested in reading?
Fan of the movies?
Some kids just don’t like to read. It’s not that they don’t know how or aren’t good readers, they just don’t like to read for pleasure.
I have twin boys, 8 years old. One is a VORACIOUS reader, the other has been in constant additional instruction to get him up to an acceptable level.
Different kids are different.
How does he behave when asked to do other things he doesn’t like to do? And does he only seem to have trouble reading when one person asks him to do it, or is it hard for anyone to get him to do it?
My son is only 5, but if his dad asks him to read something, he shuts down. He pretends he doesn’t even know his letters. Yet when I ask him to read a word or two, he is more than capable of reading simple, three-letter words and recognizing larger words by letters and context.
Is it possible that reading has become a control issue for him?
Also, how good is he at reading? My son hates writing. He’s not good at it, largely because he’s the only leftie in his classroom and always has been. His teacher in his previous classroom used to get really impatient with him because he was struggling to write and it was just very physically uncomfortable for him, so he basically just shut down. If he doesn’t feel like he’s good at something and isn’t given the time to do it as well as he thinks he should, he simply drags his heels as much as possible because he hates it. We’ve been working on it and he’s getting so much better. Perhaps you can try something similar with your son?
Reading is a skill that needs to be practiced. My nephew is 13 but delayed and it is a pain in the ass and a half to make him sit down for his required fifteen minutes of reading (it’s homework, he has to have us sign off on it.) He can read anything, and he enjoys it while he’s doing it, I swear! But he whines about having to leave the computer screen to do it and when fifteen minutes are up that is absolutely it.
Oops – I remembered only after I posted that the kid in question is your nephew. Still, the reading problem could be a control issue or just a confidence issue. It might benefit you to ask his parents some questions if you don’t have much insight into his home life.
I can’t think of a better way to kill the fun of reading than being forced to do it. Harry Potter is light entertainment – if you’re not having fun with it, then there are thousands of other books you’d be better off reading. For several years my son’s primary reading practice was videogame magazines and strategy guides. But he was reading them because they were interesting to him, not because we were standing over him with a stopwatch.
I didn’t get into reading for fun until high school. I just didn’t care about reading. Now I read all the time.