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image Organizing Reading Assignments

By Professional Organizer Lea Schneider

From kindergarten through college and beyond, your child will need to be able to pace out reading assignments. You can and should teach your child how to organize their reading material. This is a great time management skill and is likely something that their teacher is not teaching.

Little ones often have to read their story book by the end of the week. By the end of elementary school, children are expected to turn in book reports or take computer quizzes on what they read. On top of that, they may be assigned to read chapters of history or science books by a given date.

Kids do not have a built-in clock that tells them how much to read or how far to read in a given day in order to make a deadline. This is learned by experience and often that experience is painful. It is achieved by going into a panic attack by a near missed deadline or a poor grade on reading material.

In order to help them learn to organize reading, recognize first what doesn't work. It doesn't work to continually beg, remind or scold them to read their book by the deadline. Again, they have on concept that they are not on track. They figure they have plenty of time. It also does not work to insist that they sit in the chair and read for an hour or 30 minutes. If your child ends up fidgeting, coming up with interruptions and staring out the window, they will have held the book for 30 minutes but absorbed little. That doesn't help.

What does work is dividing the book or chapter by the days available to read. Pull out your calendar and then sit down with your child and the book. How many days are there remaining in which to read the book? Are there any days that you know your child will not read? How many pages are in the book?

Teach your child to divide the book's pages by the number of days available to read. Now it is clear how far he or she must read to meet the deadline. Create some book marks with sticky notes or construction paper. Write on the dates on them or days of the week. Use those to divide the book. This way, the child reads on Monday until they get to the Tuesday book mark, and so forth.

If the amount of pages to be read in a given day are too many for your child to handle in one sitting, it is now easier to divide them yet again. Perhaps they can read some after school, some more before dinner and the remaining ones before bed. Using this method, you and your child will always know if you are on track with reading material. It prevents a lot of stress and nagging. Plus, you've taught your child a valuable time management tool they will take all the way into college.