Spoof Assignment - Reading Comprehension

Having enough time to read for fun is crucial for children. It doesn't matter how much you turn off screens and how much you model reading for fun yourself... if children don't have enough time to read, they will never build a love of reading. Give them time to be bored, surround them with books, and leave them alone.

Let them change their mind, pick books up and then put them back down. Let them leave books all over the house. If they don't like a book, don't require that they finish it. Don't make it an assignment. And, above all else, don't constantly pester them with questions about everything they read!

For Too Many Kids, Books Are Uncool and Unread
The New York Times - Jul 22, 2024

They won't read for fun if reading isn't fun. You don't build a love of something if you don't feel safe while you're doing it.

When I taught 4th grade in a public school in Maryland many years ago, there was something on the standardized tests called "Reading to Perform a Task." Children had to read instructions and then analyze their effectiveness.

Here's a spoof Reading Comprehension assignment I created, to help give an example of "busy work" to parents. It's also a perfect analogy for this. Imagine you love to cook. Now think about what it would do to your love of cooking if you had to fill out worksheets like this every night after you made dinner:

Reading to Perform a Task: Making a Recipe (PDF)

And imagine what it would do to your love of reading if you had barely any time to read for fun because of homework and sports commitments after school and on the weekends; OR if every time you read something in school, you then had to answer comprehension questions and write essays about it; OR if every time you tried to read something at home, well-meaning adults kept asking about what was happening in the story. Would you love reading?