It’s been a tradition in the West to write New Year’s Resolutions at the beginning of the new year; goals that have a special significance to you that you hope to achieve before the end of the year.
Make 2020 the year you elevate your life through reading! Although Mr. Nick’s Nightly Reading is child-focused, this list can be helpful to both children and adults. Commit to the following New Years Resolutions for Readers to make it easier and more fruitful.
1. Build your library.
This one is the easiest. All of the other things on the list depend on building up your library of reading materials. That doesn’t mean you need to go out and spend a ton of money on books. Go to the bookstore and buy a few different kinds of books. As you progress through these books, you will naturally become more curious and more interested in different topics. When inspiration hits, write it down. Soon, you will have a list of books and topics to find books about.
2. Read both fiction and non-fiction.
The greatest way to improve your language skills is to expose yourself to words, sentences, grammar, and concepts from a wide range of material. Reading is the best way to quickly build up background knowledge. If you think about your diet of reading materials like a diet of food, you will quickly realize that reading only one type of book will create an unbalanced diet. If you only read comic books, that’s like only eating candy and drinking soda. Mix up your library with fantasy, science fiction, thrillers, comic books, and add in a healthy portion of skills books, history, philosophy, and science non-fiction. Soon, you will find the world is easier to understand and far more interesting.
3. Keep a student dictionary.
Student dictionaries are not only for children. Many adults suffer from a limited vocabulary, even if English is their first language. That’s not because they are stupid, and it’s not because they are uneducated. It’s because they have had a limited exposure to vocabulary, grammar, and ideas. Extensive reading will fix this, and you will find interacting with the world gets richer and more rewarding the more you learn.
4. Practice active reading skills.
Imagine you pick up a pick, look at the words, turn the pages, and close the book without ever having taken any time to actually think about what you have been reading. Are you going to get much benefit from that? Probably not. You may pick up a couple of words here and there, but more than likely it will just “go in one eye and out the other”, so to speak.
When you are reading, think actively about what you are reading. Flip back through what you have already read to get the full context, skip ahead to see where an idea is going. Read and reread sentences until you understand them. When you encounter difficult words, don’t just skip over them and don’t just guess how they are read. Apply phonics skills to read them, and apply comprehension skills to understand them.
That leads us nicely into the next resolution.
5. Improve your phonics skills.
People hear the word “phonics” and think “first grade of elementary school”. That couldn’t be more wrong. Open any dictionary, and you will find pronunciation guides for each and every word in there. This is an example of phonics. Look at the ingredients list of most processed food items and try to read some of those big, science-y words. Most people won’t even try to read them, and that’s because most people forget fundamental phonics almost as quickly as they learn them. Having strong phonics is like having a key to unlock higher and higher levels of reading.
If you talk to a professional basketball player and ask what the key to becoming a good player is, they will tell you “fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals.” The same is true for reading and learning.
6. Improve your reading comprehension.
This goes hand-in-hand with phonics and active reading. Your ability to comprehend what you are reading will determine how much you gain from reading. But, without practice, you can’t develop strong comprehension skills.
When you are reading, there are tons of things you can do to improve your comprehension. Take notes. Write in the margins of your book. Highlight words and underline sentences. Keep several books on your desk at the same time and compare things from inside them. Learn to think about and answer questions with the classic 5 Ws; who, what, when, where, why. Then add in a few more; how, in what way. These seven words and phrases are the foundations of all sorts of comprehension, not only reading.
7. Reacquaint yourself with writing.
One important New Year’s Resolution for Readers that is easy to overlook is writing.
In our high-tech world, writing is nearly a forgotten art. I am a Notary Signing Agent as my day job. My job is to guide people through complicated contracts. I see people with beautiful handwriting, and people whose handwriting is absolute chicken scratch. The people whose handwriting is nice inevitably also have hand-written notes stuck to things, paper notebooks out where they can easily be used, pencils in cups on tables, and so on. And, it’s often those people who have the big houses and the nice cars. Those people invariably have large libraries in their houses, too.
Reading and writing go hand-in-hand. They are both active skills. You simply cannot understand anything you are reading without thinking actively. Likewise, if you just put your pencil to paper and let your hand move without thought, could you write intelligibly? No.
Both reading and writing are like taking your brain to the gym and hitting the weights. On the flip side, watching and listening can be done very passively. Think about the average couch potato watching TV with nothing going on upstairs, or when you turn the radio on in the car just to have some background noise to pass the time.
Writing is one of the most neglected academic and life skills in society, today. By doing daily writing exercises, you are already elevating yourself above most people. Not only that but as you develop your writing, you will find it to be enjoyable and stress-relieving.
It’s a win-win!
And there you have it!
A few New Year’s Resolutions for Readers not only for the new year but the new decade.
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