Today I am delighted to welcome Hannah Rix to my blog. We recently connected over a shared belief that children should be allowed to read for pleasure, and if that means that they choose a book deemed ‘too easy’ for them, this should not be discouraged. Please check out her blogpost below:
In defence of letting a child read books that are ‘too easy’
Written by Hannah Rix, co-founder of Little Reads.
Little Reads is a curated library of 3,000+ hand-picked children’s books, ages 5 to 11, on iOS and Android. It’s for children who already love reading (and the grown-ups keeping them supplied), not a learn-to-read tool. More library than classroom.
I’ve got to be honest about something I held back for years when I was teaching.
It’s how much I hated watching a child with a pile of books they actually want to read, and having to steer them off it. Onto the book that will ‘move them on’. Onto the book that has to be studied. Onto the next level up.
I should explain how I ended up caring so much about this.
I went into teaching because I loved books. I loved reading them, I loved talking about them, and most of all I loved talking to other people who loved them too. In my whimsical, Miss Honey-influenced daydream of a childhood, I genuinely thought that mayyybe, just maybe, I could pass that on. That I’d press the right book into an eager little reader’s hands and watch them fall for it the way I had.
Funnily enough, it didn’t quite go like that. (My story is probably the same as a lot of English teachers, past and present.)
Now, I could climb right up on my soapbox here about how the curriculum doesn’t make room for reading for pleasure, how it can stifle the very thing it’s meant to grow. But I’ll save that for another day. Because before any of that, I want to talk about something simpler. Letting kids read.
Not read because it’s on the timetable. Not read because they’re ‘ready’ for the next stage up. Just read. Let them read the book that’s too easy. Let them read the one they’ve already read three times. Let them read the one that’s mostly drawings and silly jokes. Because it’s still reading. It might not be the version of reading some grown-ups are comfortable with, but it counts.
Reading for pleasure and learning to read are two different things, and I wish more people said so out loud. One is a skill. The other is a love affair. Schools are so stretched, so utterly on their knees, that the two end up tangled together, and reading for pleasure is almost always the first thing to go.
So my case is a small one. Let them read the easy books. (Yes, pinched straight from ‘let them eat cake’, a sentiment I’m also fully behind. But I digress.)
Why? Because the easy book is the one that keeps them reading.
I’ve always believed that reading for pleasure grows out of one thing, and that’s the freedom to choose. The moment we tut at a child for picking something ‘too easy’, we’re telling them their kind of reading doesn’t count. And a child who feels that doesn’t happily trade up to harder books. They go off the idea completely.
I saw the flip side of this when I was teaching in a complex needs school. For once, I got to focus on what the children genuinely enjoyed, rather than what a curriculum said they ought to be reading. These were children with so much else going on that dragging them through reading levels and comprehension tests would have been, frankly, a waste of everyone’s time. So instead I’d reach for Andy Stanton. I’d put on the silly voices for David Walliams. I’d let a child read, and re-read, the same Horrid Henry month after month after month. Not because of their needs, but because that reading gave them real pleasure. And pleasure, it turns out, is the whole point.
The reassuring part (the bit I clung to)? The harder books don’t go anywhere. They wait. A child who’s allowed to read for the love of it, with nobody hovering over their choices, tends to reach for them on their own in the end. The trading-up happens best when nobody’s forcing it.
So if there’s a child in your life on their tenth go of the same battered paperback, or buried in a comic, or giggling at a book three years ‘below’ them, my advice is to leave them be. Keep topping them up with more of what they love. They’re not behind. They’re exactly where a happy reader should be.
That, more than anything, is pretty much why I co-founded Little Reads. A library of 3,000+ books I’ve hand-picked for ages 5 to 11, the easy ones and the chunky ones side by side, with no levels, no quizzes and nobody keeping score. A child can choose the comfort read or the doorstopper, and both are absolutely fine by me.
No ads either. Just the books. £7.99 a month after a 7-day free trial, and you can cancel anytime. Readers of this post can get 30 days free with the code VSVIEW30. The LittleReads app can be downloaded from either the Apple App Store or Google Play stores.
One honest note before you go. It’s built for children who already love reading. If a child is still finding their feet, a different app will serve them better.
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