Reading aloud to children who can already read

Nobody marks the moment, but most families have it. A child reads a whole page alone, slowly, lips moving, and the grown-up perched on the edge of the bed thinks: they can do it now. Within a few months the bedtime story has turned into “read for ten minutes, then lights out”, and the reading aloud is over.

It looks like a sensible decision. They can read, so they should read. But it is worth asking what goes when we stop, and whether we stop too soon.

When the reading aloud stops

The habit thins out faster than most of us would guess. In HarperCollins UK’s research into reading at home, the share of under-fours who are read to frequently fell from 64% in 2012 to 41% in 2024 (HarperCollins UK, 2024). That is before school has even begun.

Once school begins, the fall gets steeper. In the United States, Scholastic’s Kids & Family Reading Report found that 55% of children aged up to five are read to at home at least five days a week, that the figure peaks at five, and that it “declines with each additional year of age” from there. Among six to eight-year-olds it was 45%, and that was after a rise from 38% two years earlier (Scholastic, The Rise of Read-Aloud). It is not the children asking for it to end. In the same survey, more than 80% of children and parents said they love or like read-aloud time a lot.

So reading aloud tends to stop at about the point a child learns to decode, and it stops because we believe the job is done.

Why the job is not done

Learning to read and loving to read are different things, and it is the second that lasts.

Their ears are ahead of their eyes. A seven-year-old who has just cracked reading can manage a book written for seven-year-olds, slowly and with effort. The stories that would really take hold of them, the ones with a plot running over a hundred pages and words they have never met, are still out of reach on their own. Read aloud, those books are not out of reach at all. Reading aloud is how a child meets the stories they cannot yet read, at exactly the age they most want them.

All their attention goes to the story. For a new reader, decoding eats up most of the attention, and not much is left for the story itself. When you read to them, every bit of it goes to the story. That is where the appetite comes from: the wanting-to-know-what-happens that will one day make them pick up a book they could easily skip.

It is company. A child reading alone in bed is doing something good, and solitary. A child being read to is doing something good with you. That kind of reading comes with a lap, a voice doing the giant, and someone to ask “what does that mean?” without feeling slow. Those are the evenings that make reading feel like a warm place rather than a task.

None of this means they should stop reading alone. It means the two can run side by side for years longer than most families manage.

Listening counts

If reading aloud is hard to fit in, remember that listening is listening, whoever is doing the reading. In the National Literacy Trust’s survey of children’s listening, 37.5% of children and young people said that listening to audio had sparked an interest in reading (National Literacy Trust, 2024). An audiobook in the car, a story on a speaker while they draw, a chapter read by a grandparent over the phone: each one feeds the same appetite.

How to keep it going at seven, eight and nine

This part is ours, from our own kitchens rather than from a survey.

A chapter a night, not a book a night. Chapter books are made for this. A chapter takes ten or fifteen minutes, ends on a small hook, and gives everyone a reason to come back tomorrow. Picture books end; chapter books continue.

Read above their level. Pick a book they could not quite manage alone. If they could read it themselves, reading it aloud is a kindness. If they could not, it is a door.

Take turns. A paragraph each, or you read the narration and they read the dialogue. A child who can read does not feel babied, and the pace holds up on the pages where a new reader would stall.

Don’t stop to teach. If they ask what a word means, tell them and keep going. The story is the point, and the vocabulary arrives by itself, carried along by the plot.

Let their hands be busy. Many children listen better while drawing or building. Sitting still is not the same as paying attention.

Keep at it when they are “too old”. Nine-year-olds will roll their eyes and then sit down anyway. Most children stop being read to long before they stop wanting it. Hold out, and the eye-rolling passes while the chapter stays.

Read things that are not books. A recipe, a letter, the sports pages, the rules of a new game. Reading aloud is a way of being together with words, and any words will do.

Something to read together that arrives

The letters we make at Journee were built for exactly this gap, between a child who can read and a child who reads. Each one is a chapter of a story in which your child is the main character and the family are in the cast, and it comes through the real letterbox with their name on the front. It can be read alone, but most families we know read the first one aloud at the table, everyone leaning in, and then the child takes it to bed to read again. The P.S. at the end asks them to choose what happens next, which makes a good argument over the washing-up. There is more on what reading does for a child at /literacy-education, and a small bedtime trick we use at home in the P.S. trick at bedtime.

Whatever you read, the point is the same. They have learnt to read. Now keep reading to them, a chapter a night, for as long as they will let you.