Teach Your Family to Read (Even the Dog!) with Susan Holt Simpson

In today's episode of the "Helping Families Be Happy" podcast, host Christopher Robbins, co-founder of Familius publishing, husband, father of nine, author, fisherman, backpacker, and aspirational musician based in the Central Valley of California talks with Susan Holt Simpson. Today they are going to talk about how to help children learn to love reading. Susan also shares tips to inculcate reading into a child's life.

Episode Highlights

• 03.30: Susan Holt Simpson is a freelance writer living in Northern Kentucky. She volunteers as a reading coach with the Kentucky one-to-one children's literacy program. Her jittery spotted dog inspired her to write and teach your dog to read.
• 2.46: Susan is going to share her insights on teaching children how to read. She gives a few hints for early reading and what parents need. How early should parents start? 
• 3.12: As per Susan children can learn to recognize somebody's reading even before they are born. 
• 04.02: As per Susan, parents can begin reading, during pregnancy and that can have an impact.
• 04.48: It is easy to just read aloud, even during feeding times, to get out those board books that you got at your baby shower and just read them to your children while they are feeding, while they are in their highchair, even during bath time putting on audiobook, especially of Mother Goose of rich rhyme and textured stories and books is good. 
• 06.02: Buying a book is not the only way to put together a library for your kids. You can also opt for secondhand resale for charity. Just searching through those resale thrift stores will have children's books for very reasonable prices. 
• 08.40: Susan talks about her love to go to libraries and wander around books. Special books are often set on top of the library shelves by the librarians because they see the value in some of these books too.
• 09.56: You can experience that New York Times has the same wonderful journals that provide great lists that you can experience if you are trying to build a beginning library. 
• 10.45: Susan prefers to buy real books for her kids and grandkids. Whenever she gets a chance.
• 12.02: Susan Shares that to spike the interest of elementary students, make sure that they are reading and the book that they are presented with is tailored to their interest. 
• 14.02: Instead of choosing books that start with their activity interest, present a book that has something that will lead you to an activity that everybody will enjoy and that will inspire more reading. 
• 15.08: Launchpad books are books that are going to launch your little guy into an interest-based activity.
• 17.00: Christopher talks about how he and his wife have opened the world of reading to their children. 

3 Key Points

1. Susan shares her thoughts on whether one should build a library for their children as they grow from newborns to toddlers to early readers to chapter readers and so on. 
2. Susan shares tips about what to do in order to help children reengage or continue their love of learning during elementary years when their world is expanding. 
3. Susan shares how she encourages people to be really natural with the way that they present reading to their children.

Tweetable Quotes

• "We can expose children to books, wherever they are, whatever they are doing." - Christopher  
• "I am a book buyer, I love going to bookstores that is an important part of the way that we acquire books for our kids and now for our grandkids to make sure that we are buying those really good quality, beautiful books that will be treasured." - Susan 
• "I do look at lists online, there are a lot of people with lists. But you know, what I like to do is I love to go to the library and just kind of wander around those beautiful books. 
• "So many of our children are now reading on any device that they happen to have." - Christopher  
• "You can encourage anyone to read in, regardless of what medium that they like." – Susan
• "Rather than be too concerned about their expanding universe complement their expanding universe with books that align with their expanded universe." - Susan

Resources Mentioned

• Susan's Book
• https://susanholtsimpson.com/
• Podcast Editing