Reading Incentives

I find that sometimes my children (one in particular) need a little incentive to read more.

In October I came up with the idea of a reading tree.
My son drew a tree on a poster board.
For each book read, a leaf was added to the tree.
It worked quite well, but we ran out of leaves and actually read much more than we recorded.

As an added incentive, I made everyone set reading goals and offered a prize for anyone who reached their goal.
Everyone reached their goals and received new books as a prize!






We planned to do the same thing using a winter theme.
I decided against it, though, because it was really a lot of
work, and as I said, we had the problem of not having enough room for everything they read.

So, I came up with another plan.
This one is much simpler, but it still gives them something to work towards.

This is one side of our bulletin board.
As you can see, there are strings of beads on it.

There is one string for each child.

For every book they read, they get one bead added to the string.
For every tenth book, they get a different colored bead added (makes it easier to count them ;-)).
When they are full, they will get to hang them on their bulletin boards in their rooms as a tangible reminder of how much they've read.
They are hoping to end up with many strings to add to their collection. :-)

I may also offer a prize for this as well- perhaps new books for every string filled.

Oh, and underneath the beads is simply a sheet of paper to record the number of books everyone read each month.


These are little things that may seem insignificant, but they actually work.
My children have been reading almost constantly since I've started this.