The Library Bag Behind the Shoe Cabinet
Last November, a week before the school holidays, I found our library bag behind the shoe cabinet. Inside were five books, all borrowed by me for my son, all unopened, all overdue. He was in P3 and had decided, somewhere around the middle of the year, that reading was "boring and for school". Hiding the bag was his way of ending the conversation.
His little sister, then in K2, was the opposite. She would read the back of the cereal box if nothing else was available. Same parents, same flat, same shelf of books. Two completely different readers.
For the year-end holidays we tried something new: a reading challenge we made ourselves, on one sheet of paper, with rules the children helped to write. It did not turn my son into a bookworm overnight. But he read more over those six weeks than in the six months before, and he chose most of it himself. This year he is in P4, his sister is in P1, and the challenge is going back on the fridge. Here is how to make your own.
Why Make Your Own Challenge
Libraries and schools sometimes run reading programmes of their own, and if your child enjoys one, wonderful. A home-made challenge does something slightly different: it fits your children exactly, and the family owns it.
A few principles we built ours on:
- Variety, not volume. Counting pages or books rewards the fast readers and quietly punishes the slow ones. Rewarding different kinds of reading means every child can win.
- The child chooses the books. Within the challenge, nearly every choice is theirs.
- No quizzes, no book reports. A challenge that ends in a worksheet is not a holiday.
- Small rewards, if any. A family outing when the card is full works better than a prize for every book, which tends to produce a sudden interest in very short books.
The Bingo Card
The heart of our challenge is a bingo card. Draw a grid on an A4 sheet, five squares across and five down, with a free square in the middle. Each square names a kind of reading. A completed line in any direction earns a small celebration; a full card earns the big one.
Here are squares we have used, to mix and match:
- A comic or graphic novel
- A book about Singapore
- A book in your Mother Tongue
- A non-fiction book about animals
- A book someone else in the family picked for you
- A book you have read before and loved
- A book of poems or rhymes
- A book with a map in it
- A book set in another country
- A cookbook (and cook one thing from it)
- A book that has been made into a film or show
- Read to someone younger
- Read to a grandparent
- Read outdoors: the void deck, a park bench, the beach
- A book by an author you have never read
- A joke or riddle book
- A book about a real person
- A book about how something works
- A slightly scary book (as scary as you like, no more)
- A book recommended by a librarian
- An audiobook
- A book your parent loved as a child
- A book from the new arrivals shelf
A few tweaks that kept the card fair across two very different readers:
- Different cards for different children. My daughter's card had more read-aloud squares; my son's had more comics and non-fiction. Same game, different board.
- One book can only tick one square. Otherwise a single football annual will try to claim five.
- Swaps are allowed. If a square is a genuine dread, the child can swap it once for a square of their own invention. My son's invention was "a book with a dog on the cover", which, to be fair, sent him to the shelves.
Making the Library Trip a Ritual
A challenge works best when the library visit becomes a fixed, pleasant part of the week rather than an errand squeezed in between other things.
- Same day each week, if you can manage it. Ours was Thursday morning, followed by kaya toast.
- Browse, don't rush. Give children time to wander the shelves. The book that hooks a reluctant reader is often one neither of you was looking for.
- Ask the librarian. Librarians are usually glad to help a child find "a book like the one I just finished", and it ticks a square on the card.
- Use the catalogue together. Older children can search for a title or an author and reserve it themselves, which is a small lesson in independence.
- Check the current loan rules and opening hours on the official library website before you go, since these can change.
- Give library books one home in the flat. A basket or a shelf where they always go back. After the shoe cabinet incident, we learned this one the hard way.
Read-Aloud Is Not Just for Little Ones
Many parents stop reading aloud once their child can read independently, usually somewhere in lower primary. I did. It was a mistake, and the challenge is what made me start again.
Reading aloud to an older child does things their own reading cannot yet do. You can read a book a little above their level, so they meet richer words and longer sentences inside a story they can still follow. You can pause and wonder aloud why a character did something. And it is time together, which in upper primary becomes harder and harder to find.
- A chapter at bedtime works well from P3 to P6. Choose something exciting enough that they beg for "one more chapter".
- Older children reading to younger ones is a gift in both directions. The older child practises expression and pace; the younger one gets a reader who is not a parent, which is somehow far more glamorous.
- Grandparents reading in their own language counts on the card, and it gives grandparents a lovely role over the holidays.
Mother Tongue Books on the Card
We put a Mother Tongue square on the card on purpose. In many homes, English reading happens fairly naturally over the holidays, while Chinese, Malay or Tamil reading can quietly disappear for six weeks.
- Go below level. A P4 child reading a picture book in Chinese is not going backwards. Comfortable reading builds fluency and confidence.
- Look for bilingual books, which help children who are less sure of their Mother Tongue follow along.
- Comics count here too. Many children who resist their Mother Tongue textbook will happily read a funny comic in the same language.
- Read together. If your own Mother Tongue is rusty, take turns, or let your child read to you and teach you a word or two. Children love being the expert.
Ideas by Level, P1 to P6
Every child is different, but here are some starting points.
- P1 and P2: picture books, early readers with short chapters, non-fiction with big photographs, rhyming books to read aloud together. A rough guide many parents use: if your child stumbles on lots of words on a single page, save that book for read-aloud time rather than solo reading.
- P3 and P4: series fiction, where children follow the same characters across many books; non-fiction about whatever they are obsessed with this month, whether that is sharks, football or volcanoes; joke books; graphic novels.
- P5: longer novels, stories told from more than one point of view, books about real people, and the occasional book a little older than they are, read aloud together and talked about.
- P6, after PSLE: anything at all, purely for pleasure. After a year of exam passages, a P6 child disappearing into a fat fantasy novel or a pile of comics is exactly right.
Helping the Reluctant Reader
If your child is anything like my son, a bingo card alone will not do it. Some things that helped us:
- Start with what they love, not what you think they should read. My son loves football. His first book of the challenge was a football annual. It counted.
- Comics and graphic novels are real reading. They are full of vocabulary, they ask children to work out meaning from pictures and words together, and they build stamina. Let them count, every time.
- Audiobooks are reading too. Listening on a long MRT ride or while drawing builds vocabulary and a feel for stories, especially for children who find decoding tiring.
- Let them abandon books. Adults do. A child forced to finish a book they dislike learns that reading is a punishment.
- Keep it short at first. Ten minutes before lights out is plenty to begin with.
- Don't quiz. "Did you like it?" is a fine question. "What was the main idea of chapter three?" is homework.
- Let them see you read. A parent reading a book on the sofa, instead of a phone, does more than any lecture about reading.
The Reading Wall, and the Last Day
The final piece was the one my children liked best: a reading wall. We stuck a long strip of paper along the wall of our corridor inside the flat, and every finished book became a paper leaf on a growing vine, with the title and a one-word review. "Funny." "Scary." "Meh." "Best."
By the end of December, the vine had climbed past the light switch, and my son, who had hidden the library bag only weeks before, was quietly counting his leaves against his sister's.
On the last day of the holidays, we sat in front of the wall and each picked one favourite book to tell the others about in one minute. Nobody was marked. Nobody was corrected. It was just three readers and a paper vine, which is all a holiday reading challenge ever needs to be.