You’ve come to the right place, if you’re keen on exploring when kids learn to read, the challenges they face, why reading is crucial for their academic and personal growth and, of course, some practical advice on how to get started with the habit building.

Last but not least, we will not let you leave empty-handed. A list of resources is also waiting for you to support your students or your child’s reading development. Let’s get started, taking a look at the basics.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, most children learn to read by the end of third grade. However, children develop at their own pace, and some may learn to read earlier or later.

With gaming apps, television, YouTube, and too much screen time, it can be challenging to cultivate a reading habit in children. However, reading is a critical skill that fosters creativity, improves vocabulary, and enhances cognitive development.

Parents and educators can help young learners develop reading habits by setting aside time each day for reading and providing a conducive environment that encourages reading.

Habits are not easy to build and require some key concepts to be true: consistency and strategy. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it does take a couple of clever steps to achieve, but it is so worth it!

Let’s see what are some of these steps that you can take. 

Begin reading to the little ones as early as possible. Reading to children in kindergarten is very useful, even if, at this point, the child isn’t an active participant.

This experience helps them prepare for the primary school and nurture their love for stories.

As students develop their reading skills, encourage them to read independently. Start with simple books and gradually progress to more challenging books, but with a smart digital tool, you could even assign books to your students through the app and give homework.

BOOKR Class for example enables students to choose their interests – such as sports, nature or animals – and the system automatically shows them books they are likely to read and enjoy. What a great way to engage them!

Create a comfortable and inviting reading environment. Ensure there’s adequate lighting, a comfortable seat, and no distractions.

Children are more likely to develop a reading habit if they see their parents and teachers reading regularly.

Set an example by reading yourself and discussing books with them – of course always in an age-appropriate manner.

Reading is crucial for not only a child’s academic but personal growth. It helps to develop language skills, fosters creativity, and improves cognitive development. Reading also helps children to develop empathy, social awareness, and understanding of different cultures.

Additionally, reading improves academic performance, enhances vocabulary, and improves comprehension skills. The list of benefits goes on and on, however one element stands out: reading has a positive impact on children’s mental health. 

Don’t believe me, believe the experts of leading universities and organizations across the globe, here are some statistics that support the positive impact of reading:

These statistics all highlight the same baseline: reading can have a massively positive impact  on children’s mental well-being.

By encouraging children to read regularly, parents and educators can help promote healthy habits and positive attitudes towards learning and self-improvement, while also providing children with important tools for coping with stress and difficult emotions.

Reading in a foreign language can be an excellent way for children to develop language skills and enhance their cultural awareness. The British Council’s LearnEnglish Kids website offers a variety of reading resources to help children develop their English language skills.

There are also reading applications with graded readers developed specifically for ESL students – so you can improve reading and English skills at the same time, killing two birds with one stone. 

How to change the narrative and make reading a fun and enjoyable activity, rather than a daunting task? 

Let’s see some tips and activities that can help make reading an experience for children.

What to pay close attention to during lesson planning 

How to further discover a topic that you read about in class? Here are some ideas on how to snowball their reading and language development, starting with the reading task. Improve their writing skills, vocabulary, or creativity.

Oh, such crucial areas!

Have your child create their own illustrations for the story. This can help them engage with the content and better understand the plot.

There is no doubt that there is a variety of resources to help promote reading in the classroom. The question is: do you have time to find these resources and make sure you use reliable, quality materials that support your lesson goals?

How about a collection of books that supports you in creating the most exciting and effective ESL reading lessons, aiming to make reading a habit for kids? You can download the 300 pages long Teacher’s Handbook created by BOOKR Class’ qualified teachers and educational content experts.

Christmas lesson plans are invaluable tools for educators seeking to make the holiday season meaningful and educational for their students. Christmas offers not only opportunities for joy and playful learning but also a chance to delve into important themes and values with even the youngest learners. This year, we aim to provide more than just activity tips to enhance your Christmas vocabulary lesson; we want to offer resources that support your students’ social-emotional development.

Let us present to you the great BOOKR Christmas Escape Room, a detective game that will keep your class busy throughout the Advent period. A mystery that is being solved with different worksheets and games, some creative, some teach problem-solving or logical thinking, all the while providing a strong foundation for the lexis of Christmas-related expressions. Follow our post, each week you’ll find new mysteries to solve with the smartest little elves at school or at home. It’s the perfect quality time spent playing and learning, the ultimate bonding experience with your children and/or students. 

Each game will give you a solution that you will need to fill this crossword puzzle with. At the end of all 8 games, you will see the code that unlocks the location of the books.  Pay attention to the column in yellow. 

Download the crossword puzzle from here, print it, and keep it until the end of the game. As a special treat, you can have the fastest little ‘detectives’ color the image, it’s great fun to do while waiting for their peers to finish.

Without any further ado, let’s look at the story here. What happened to all these books on the BOOKRshelf?

Owen, the grumpy snowman, gets overwhelmed when he can’t read the Christmas books because they get wet in his frosty little hands. So, he decides to hide all the books. Let’s cheer him up! If we make him feel better about the books, he might return them for all kids to read. 

The first game will show you who Owen’s helper will be throughout this adventure. 

Crack the code with Owen’s little helper to get closer to the location of the books. 

But wait – who is Owen’s helper? This Christmas Maze will show you.

‘Tis the season to deck the halls and spread Christmas cheer throughout our homes. But why stop there? Let’s extend the festive spirit into our classrooms with enchanting Christmas classroom decorations.

Let’s show Owen how great Christmas really is! 

BO Bunny loves decorating the Christmas tree. What does he put on the tree? 

This game’s solution will tell you. All you need to do is color the words related to Christmas and winter. What do you see? 

Instructions: Owen gets frustrated sometimes. Let’s try and help him feel better, maybe he can tell us where the hid the next clue. 

Oh no, part of the list of activities has been erased! Look at the definitions and try to find out what they mean. Write the words on the sheet after their number. The solution to this challenge is the word in the red column.

This challenge is a bit different. It’s not only meant to practice English as a second language, but to teach the little ones techniques to deal with frustration or sadness.

In case you need a little extra support to talk to your children or students about these topics and help them release stress, we got just the right books for you:

The words of this task have been simplified to the age group and level that we wanted to target, but don’t stop there if you feel like this is something your students can benefit from. Discuss the topics in your own language one by one, if English would be too hard. How can friends help you when you’re feeling down? Why is it good to clean your room and surroundings if you’re overwhelmed? Social-emotional learning is best learnt at an early age. 

Cookies and hot chocolate – these delicious Christmas treats for the classroom might cheer Owen up.

Pair the images with these words. If one image doesn’t have a pair, that will be your next clue. 

BO Bunny and Owen love reading stories.

What a great way to cheer up! They’re looking at Level 1 and Level 2 books. 

Do your students know these stories? 

Discover them with your students and children, or practice reading comprehension in English. 

A true escape room challenge that gets students to use their logical thinking skills. Let’s see who’s the first one to crack the code.

Christmas vocabulary with just a tad of Imperative practice.

Find the favourite thing that Owen owns, hopefully, it will cheer him up.

Cross the pictures, this list will help you decide which ones.

This is where it ends, friends. The last mini-game will give you the last letter.

And what is the final solution? It’s a word that really surrounds us this time of the year especially. We should all be lucky to spend this time together with whom we love the most: whether it’s family, friends, colleagues, or our beloved pets.

What an amazing way to end the year in class or at home: with a deep conversation about belonging and caring with the little ones.

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy and Joyful New Year!

Spoiler alert! Find the solution to the master puzzle here:

You can use the books as a well-earned reward after a particular topic or material, to close your lesson, or simply for reading for pleasure. In fact, some of the ideas for these quick activities are in the last part of the introductory chapter.

The introductory part of the handbook was written by the educational team, while the unit plans are the masterpiece from the combined work of 6 teachers from different backgrounds, who were willing to share their expertise with us about how to use the app in lessons. The lesson plans were reviewed and edited by the educational team, so it was a group effort between 6 teachers and us, who have come together with one goal in mind – to provide you with educationally rich material! 

There is an introduction to the handbook for those who would like to understand the concept and app better, unit plans for 12 BOOKR Class books and the appendix. The first part of the document includes:

On every level there are 2 unit plans, so a total of 12 unit plans altogether. That gives you 36 lessons + the condensed 3 in 1s which are extracts of the three-lesson-long unit plans. 

We picked two books from each BOOKR Class level. This list of 12 books vary in genre,  have different topics and improve the students in different ways besides language teaching (literature, biology, history, soft skills, finances…).

We created the unit plans in the approach principled eclecticism. This means that we combined various approaches and methodologies to teach language depending on the aims of the lesson and the needs of the learners. And of course the communicative approach, which helps to increase student talking time.

There is always a warm-up activity, to recall the students’ previous knowledge and we raise interest, then we make the students work and think to deepen their understanding and improve their language skills. It is followed by a wrap-up exercise and there are also planned activities for evaluation. Here the students mainly evaluate each other or their own work during the lesson. 

A unit is a 3 lesson long complex session which guides the students and the teacher through a BOOKR book. Relying on the students’ language level we planned a lesson to introduce the book. Then comes a lesson with a chosen focus (comprehension, grammar…) and the last one is centered around language production. 

We also take into account those who don’t have the opportunity to work with a book for three lessons. A condensed lesson is a plan for one lesson, which gives a shorter but the same quality experience with the topic and the book.  

To satisfy individual preferences, there are cross-curricular activities that teach other subject matters, such as biology, geography, history. There are many content and language integrated activities that use language as a tool to teach about a historical period, the parts of animals or a recipe, for example

Yes, for sure! All the extra materials needed to bring these lesson plans to life are included in the Appendix. There are flashcards, coloring pages, cutout puppets, thought-provoking printable questions, role play cards and much more.

All the books are accessible in the BOOKR Class app, so one might think that the Teacher’s Handbook is not that useful for those who haven’t started using the app yet.

However, some of the stories that we chose can often be found in most school libraries, such as the Itsy Bitsy Spider, the Stone Soup or the Yellow Wallpaper. If you would like to compare what you’ve been doing so far when you wanted to work with Itsy Bitsy’s story, you can check our suggestions and see how you and your students could benefit from using the application or the desktop app.

If your class or your school is already a BOOKR Class subscriber, we’re sending you a digital copy via email soon. If your school hasn’t subscribed yet, don’t worry. Subscribe now on our website or access the handbook through our webpage. The only thing you need to do is to click on the following link, subscribe with your email address and you can have it for free.

The BOOKR Class Teacher’s handbook is designed for innovative educators looking for ideas how to implement digital interactive books in their curriculum. 

One thing is for sure: this Teacher’s Handbook is a unique, quality resource with valuable advice from experienced professionals. If you’re just getting started with BOOKR Class or longing for fresh ideas, the BOOKR Class Teacher’s handbook is just for you!

If you’re interested in more, join our teacher community on facebook. Feedback is always appreciated, and feel free to share your comments in the group.

Divide the class into smaller groups of three or four students and distribute the board game, a deck of cards, a dice and figures. If necessary, go through the instructions on the fields. 

Link surfing is a fun online activity not only for your Easter classes. All your students need is a computer and a wikipedia page in front of them.

The students’ task is to arrive at the Wikipedia page “Easter” only using the hyperlinks of the website. This challenges their cognitive skills, reading skills and how fast they can scan through a text.

Ask your beginners to decorate a paper egg. Using this paper egg have a fun Easter role play with this dialogue, for example:

Here’s a tip to level up the previous activity for your intermediate students. Ask them to form pairs, and  think of a great present idea for their partners. Ask them to finish the sentence “If I were an Easter bunny, I would bring you a(n) X. Then to elaborate on why they’d bring a “pencil case” or “confidence” or an “alarm clock” for their partners.

If you’re seeking versatile teaching materials suitable for a variety of classes, look no further! Our monthly downloadable resources offer a wealth of engaging content, including specialized materials for Easter and much more.

With a plethora of worksheets and supplementary resources at your fingertips, you’ll never run short of inspiration for your lessons.

Don’t miss out—download our material today and unlock a world of educational possibilities!

Please don’t forget to add #BOOKRClass when you share it! We need to see your picture to include it in the competition!

Our lucky winner will receive this amazing gift pack including our beloved BOOKR Class rabbit and a free annual BOOKR Class Library App subscription!

Good luck and have fun!

Check out the BOOKR Class website to learn more about high-quality digital interactive animated storybooks.

Organise a fun parade for your students. Divide the class into groups, delegate them to an English-speaking country and ask them to colour their flag. Help them prepare for a parade, let them fly their flags and march across the classroom to the national anthem. Look at a world map together and have them place their flags on it. Also encourage them to create a poster or draw other pictures that symbolise their country.