Blog · November 13, 2026 · 5 min read

How to Make Reading Aloud Fun: Ideas That Work

To make reading aloud fun, let your child pick the book, read it like a performance instead of a recital, stop to talk about the pictures, and end while everyone still wants more. Kids enjoy it more than parents assume: in Scholastic’s reading report, 83% of children ages 6 to 17 said they loved or liked a lot being read aloud to, and 40% of kids ages 6 to 11 whose parents had stopped said they wished their parents had kept going ¹. Five good minutes beat thirty minutes of a book nobody chose.

Let your child pick the book, even the one you’re tired of

Choice does more for enjoyment than any voice you can do. In Scholastic’s Canadian survey, 94% of children agreed that their favorite books are the ones they picked out themselves, and 92% said they’re more likely to finish a book they chose ⁷.

Your job is to widen the shelf, not to approve the pick. If the choice is between a graphic novel and nothing, the graphic novel wins every time.

• Keep a basket of 10 to 15 books in the room where you actually read, and swap it every few weeks.
• Let your child carry their own library bag and check out whatever fits in it.
• Count comics, joke books, nature guides, cookbooks, and audiobook-and-book pairs as real reading.
• Offer two books and let them choose one when the open question gets overwhelming.

Read it like a performance, not a recital

You don’t need acting training. You need to sound like you’re having a good time, which mostly means slowing down and leaving space.

Pick one silly voice and keep it consistent for that character. Kids will correct you if you forget, and the correcting is part of the fun.

• Pause for one full beat before you turn a big page.
• Drop to a whisper for the scary-exciting parts instead of getting louder.
• Hand over the sound effects, the knocks, and the repeated line.
• Let your child turn the pages so their hands have a job.

Talk about the book while you read it

Researchers call the back-and-forth style dialogic reading: instead of reading straight through, the adult asks open-ended questions and builds on whatever the child says ⁵. It sounds fancy, but in practice it’s just conversation with a book in your lap.

Aim for two or three questions per sitting, not a quiz on every page. If your child interrupts to tell you about their day, that’s the goal, not a derailment.

• “What do you think happens on the next page?”
• “Why do you think he did that?”
• “Find something on this page that starts with the same sound as your name.”
• “Has anything like this ever happened to you?”
• “What would you have said to her?”

Reading the same book forty times isn’t a waste

It can feel like a loop you’ll never escape, but repetition is doing real work. Research on storybook reading has found that reading the same stories repeatedly helps preschoolers learn new words better than reading several different stories ⁴.

Once a book is familiar, you can play with it. Leave off the last word of a rhyme and let your child supply it. Read a line wrong on purpose. Tell the story from the pictures with the words covered. A book your child knows by heart is the easiest one for them to “read” back to you.

Build a ritual around it, especially in winter

Fun is mostly atmosphere. The same book is better under a blanket with a flashlight than it is on the couch with the TV murmuring in the next room.

December gives you a ready-made excuse. Icelanders exchange books on Christmas Eve and spend the evening reading them, a tradition called Jolabokaflod, or the Christmas book flood, whose origins go back to the restricted wartime years of the 1940s, when paper was one of the few things not in short supply ⁶. You can copy it on any night you like: one wrapped book per person, cocoa, no screens, everybody reads.

If your family already follows the Icelandic Yule Lads down from the mountains in December, a book night fits neatly into that run of thirteen nights. We have letters from the Yule Lads and a stack of winter coloring pages for the quiet part of the evening.

• Same chair, same lamp, same time of day, so nobody has to negotiate.
• Flashlights or a string of lights instead of the overhead bulb.
• A bookmark your child made, so stopping mid-chapter feels planned.
• One wrapped book on a December night, read together before bed.

Keep reading aloud after your child can read alone

This is the part most families drop too early. The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages parents and caregivers to read aloud with children starting in infancy and continuing at least through kindergarten, and frames it as a parenting practice with benefits well beyond literacy ³.

The volume adds up, too. Ohio State researchers estimated that young children whose parents read them five books a day start kindergarten having heard about 1.4 million more words than children who were never read to ².

Older kids still want it, even when they say they’re too big. Read them a book one level past what they’d tackle alone, because their listening comprehension runs ahead of their reading. That’s where the fun lives at age nine.

What to do when it goes sideways

Most read-aloud trouble has a simple fix, and almost none of it means your child dislikes books.

• Wiggly child: let them draw, build, or hold something soft. Listening doesn’t require stillness.
• Toddler who flips pages: skip the text and narrate the pictures at their speed.
• Child who keeps interrupting: answer, then say, “Let’s see if the book tells us,” and read on.
• Older child who says it’s boring: the book is wrong, not the child. Abandon it without ceremony.
• You’re exhausted: set a timer for five minutes and stop when it rings.

Keep a little record of what you read together

Write the date and the title inside the front cover of books you own, or keep a running list on the fridge. A year from now it’s a snapshot of who your child was: the dinosaur months, the summer of one joke book, the first chapter book you finished together.

If you’d rather keep it in one place, our memory page has room for the book, the date, and a photo of the two of you reading it.