When my older son was beginning to show an interest in reading, we looked for ways to encourage his interest without pressuring him to learn to read (he was four at the time).  I have observed, much too often in my preschool-teaching days, parents who want their child to succeed at reading to the degree that the child becomes completely turned off of the idea of understanding the written word.  Combining things children love with print can encourage the child to want to know more about how words work and what reading is all about.

As it happened, our family was preparing for a long, fun-filled weekend at the beach.  So, I included a disposable camera for my son to use on our trip.  Disposable cameras are so inexpensive now, so they make excellent choices for preschoolers and grade-schoolers alike as far as creating their own pictoral journal of the event.  My son was thrilled with his new “toy”, and since there were 27 exposures on it, we let him take a few up front to get a feel for how the camera worked.

Once we were on our trip, our son took pictures of everything - the ferry we rode to get to the beach house, the shells he found on the shoreline, the top of my husband’s head with seagulls flying overhead.  He even took pictures of the inside of the house we stayed in and pictures out the car window on the way home (it was raining).  Everywhere our son went, the camera went as well.

At home, we sent the camera off to be developed and picked up our pictures shortly thereafter.  For a couple of days, I simply let my son look at his pictures, talking about them, remembering certain things that happened and different places we visited.  Then, he and I sat down with his ten favorite pictures.  We glued one on each page and then we wrote a simple sentence about that photo.  I stapled the pages into a book, and suddenly, our son had a book that he essentially wrote and could read!

Creating his own story gave our son ownership of his words.  He understood what all the words said, and he quickly realized that the words on the page stayed the same, they never changed.  He took it to his grandparents’ house to show them, to his preschool to show his teacher, and he even packed it in his bag for a playdate a couple of months later.  Creating his own story was the perfect way to encourage our son to be a reader (and a writer!).