Paying to learn

This evening, I offered Arthur £10 if he completed a Jackie Chan book.

The bribe began at £50 if he finished a chapter book. (I began by using the word "novel" but quickly realised I was moving too fast.) This would be a big deal as he fears the chapter book, has never attempted one on his own. Obviously, as a reader myself, this just seems wrong. How can I have produced a child who won't read fiction? Although this isn't strictly true. He will read fiction in either picture or comic book form, neither of which I'm against. I just have a yearning to see him read some blocks of text.  For a while, he shied away from chapter books because they were too hard. He's not found reading easy so wading through a whole page of words was just slow and miserable. Now, he's doing better. Certainly, he has enough words to read a simple chapter book, but he isn't in the habit of doing so. Hence the bribe. But £50 was really for something like a whole Alex Rider or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Clearly, that is for another day, but a short, eight chapter Jacky Chan, that has to be worth something.

And, I have to say, the boy came through. He completed the whole thing, lying upside down on his bed, feet up against he wall, almost like a child who likes reading. It may have been a one-off but it was definitely worth a tenner to see.