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How to Improve Reading Skills in Primary School Children

As parents of growing children, a valid and common concern tends to be the inculcation of reading habits in their young ones. We often see kids getting distracted by screens and showing resistance to the act of reading, which of course has various negative ramifications in the long run.

So, if you’re the parent of a toddler or primary school child, here’s what you can do to engrain productive reading habits in them. 

Step 1: Cultivating a love of Stories

Before children reach the age of being able to read, they can still fall in love with stories themselves. This is the true starting point – creating an appetite for adventures plots and fun characters in whatever medium they arrive.
Storytelling can happen through:

  • Bedtime and Freetime narration: Make the narration of stories like a ritual – be it through sharing family histories,your own childhood adventures, or making up fantastical tales before your child goes to bed.
  • Roleplay with toys: Encourage your child to act out scenarios with their toys and simultaneously attempt to inspire them with prompts. This gives them the space to invent their own characters and conflicts and also teaches them that they have agency to create narratives.
  • Bring in stories into everyday tasks: Make even the most mundane of things, such as a walk in the park, an opportunity to create narrative-quests. You can ask questions like ‘Where do you think that large bird is flying today? What is its mission?’

Step 2: Build Sustained Attention before building Skill

One of the biggest obstacles parents face in getting their children to open a book and stay put, isn’t reluctance – it’s often a diminishing attention span. This can partially be attributed to kids being constantly exposed to fast-cut, high stimulation screen content that – by comparison – makes books too tedious to go through. Thus, it is essential to limit their screentime, especially in early years, to ensure solid attentiveness.

Step 3: Let the format grow with the child

  • Start with picture books: These aid with imagination and an entertaining experience, and make reading more enriching for early ages with additional visual stimuli. As they say, ‘a picture paints a thousand words’,  so picture books and early learning activities are a solid starting companion with the provision of helpful context clues.
  • Introduce Emotional Stories Early: Don’t shy away from getting your child to engage with stories dealing honestly with loss, friendship, and fear – extremely sanitized stories lacking real stakes don’t ask much of a kid’s heart. When a child really roots for a character, cries at their losses, or laughs out loud, their emotional investment helps with locking in a permanent reading habit. 
  • Bring in encyclopedias alongside fiction: A child’s mind is inherently curious, so shift from ‘learning to read’, to ‘reading to learn’. Balance narrative fiction with facts, and aid their sense of wonder. If they ask a difficult question about space or dinosaurs, go beyond giving a simple answer, and make it an adventurous quest of looking up the answer through an encyclopedia. 

Pro tip: If an older child likes the idea of a screen as well as reading, consider using an e-reader to grow their habit. Such devices, such as Kindles and Kobos, do not strain the eyes, don’t have blue light, have built-in dictionaries, are portable, are not over-stimulating or distracting.

Why do reading habits matter?

  • Increases creativity and imagination: While videos and other electronic stimuli provide ready-made (and often over-stimulating) visuals, text pushes the brain to build entire worlds, characters, and landscapes through visualization. Such active stimulation strengthens areas of the brain associated with creative imagery and spatial reasoning, while simultaneously also building pattern-recognition and flexible thinking in children.
  • Deep empathy: By stepping into the shoes of a diverse range of characters, children learn from perspectives and cultures that can be vastly different from their own.
  • Vocabulary and Communication Skills: Reading habitually exposes children to richer sentence structures and vocabulary that they would likely not be picking up otherwise in daily conversations, helping them understand words alongside their contexts and speak in clearer/organized ways. 
  • Analytical Problem Solving: Following a plot and/or gaining knowledge causes children to track cause and effect, predict outcomes, and reason through perspectives, all (as mentioned) building pattern-recognition.
  • Understanding History and the Contemporary World: Through the exploration of themes such as Justice, Consequences, Relationships, Power, etc. books end up serving as portable time machines and windows into both historical events as well as the nuanced modern world around them.

Best Books for School-Age Children in 2026

To help guide your child through their reading journey, here is a compilation of classic, foundational masterpieces – these stories have earned their place on every reading list for a reason, and still work exactly as they did decades ago:

Ages 2 to 5:

  • Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
  • The Very Hungry Caterpillar
  • Dear Zoo
  • Where’s Spot?
  • Goodnight Moon
  • We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
  • Room on the Broom
  • The Gruffalo
  • Guess How Much I Love You
  • Giraffes Can’t Dance
  • The Rainbow Fish
  • Press Here
  • The Book with No Pictures
  • The Gajapati Kulapati
  • Pattu’s Pumpkin

The Spark of Imagination (Ages 6-8):

  • The Whimsy of Dr. Suess
  • The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
  • A Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes

Developing Emotional Depth (Ages 8-10):

  • Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White:
  • The Roald Dahl Collection
  • Victory Song by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Analytical thinking and more Complex themes (10-12):

  • Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
  • Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
  • Wonder by R.J. Palacio
  • The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
  • The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Interested in giving your child access to book-rich learning spaces and dedicated reading support? Take a look at the K12 facilities at Kiya World School’s Gambhiram campus, discover why families across Gambhiram choose Kiya, or begin your child’s admissions journey today.