Encourage a love of reading with Kobo Kids

If I were to summarize what I’ve learned so far about preparing your child to learn, it would look like this: foster a love of reading in your child. This message has come in many forms, but it’s always the same takeaway. Read with your child, give your child access to great books, and, likely most important, lead by example, and you will prepare your child for success in numerous facets of school and life.

I feel we’ve done fairly well at this in most regards and we are definitely raising little readers, but up until recently we haven’t had much time to model this behavior ourselves. Any parent of young children will tell you that there simply are not enough hours in the day, and one of my main struggles has been finding the time to get back into the kind of reading I did pre-kids. 

This is why I fell in love with the Toronto-based company, Kobo. Since my downtime is usually unpredictable and happens at moments you are least likely to have books with you, I love that I can bring Kobo with me on my phone and any time I have a moment I can be whisked away to whatever story I’m in the middle of.

That means when 15 minutes turns into 90 minutes at the doctor or my boss is running late, I can enjoy reading while I wait. All of a sudden it doesn’t seem like a pain to have to wait a half hour for a prescription or sit in a crowded lobby for an hour during dance class. And, with so many titles to choose from in the Kobo store, I’m guaranteed to find a book that I can immerse myself in.

But, now that the kids are older, I'm ready to introduce them to the joys of eReading with Kobo as well. And, while I knew that they had one of the biggest collections of eBooks anywhere with over 4 million books, what I didn’t know was how impressive the new Kobo Kids Store library is. With nearly 100,000 kid’s titles to choose from simply by downloading, it makes it easy to feed their love of reading. That’s exactly no driving, no begging the kids to be quiet as we walk past all the people studying, no late fees, and no sticky copies of well-loved children’s books to stress me out. It’s basically the best library ever.

Since I don’t have all day to debate about kids books, I love that I can quickly search by age range, interests, or specific characters my kids love and it Kobo will pull up selections personalized just for me. My kids are on the younger side of the recommended age group, so I love that they even have audio books for my son and first reader books for my daughter, and I adore that many of those books can grow with them for years so that we can really maximize the value of the books we buy.

Or, even better, I can give the kids book allowances and let them happily debate for hours about what book they would enjoy the most. Thankfully, they can only see books appropriate for kids up to age 18 so I know they aren’t going to be downloading adult books, and I can even set additional parental controls to make sure that they are only seeing what I would like them to see when they log in. That means they can shop safely, learn to budget their allowance, buy books instead of candy and junk, and at the same time they are visiting faraway places, learning new things, using their imaginations, and having downtime to escape and just relax.

And, it all takes up less space on our bookcase than one children’s book. Meet the Kobo Arc 7HD, my new best friend.

We have been getting to know the PTPA award-winning Kobo Arc 7HD for the past few days
and I can already tell that I’m going to be smitten. As a parent, there’s nothing I want more than seeing my kids excited about learning, and they definitely are more than excited with the new Kobo that showed up last week.

While this is perfect for hubby and I to allow us to play, read, and work on the road, it all is a bit advanced for my little readers. But, I love that I can lock down the things that they aren't ready for and allow them to grow into all the features of the tablet. In the meantime, the Kobo can track their reading progress, tell me how much time they are spending reading, and give me a window into what they are really enjoying reading about.

But, since there are four of us and one Kobo tablet, I also went ahead and downloaded the free Kobo app to my husband’s iPhone so that when the Kobo tablet is already in use, we both have a backup reading device. Any of us can also log into our accounts on the phones or the tablet and it will load our entire library and bookmarks to seamlessly sync across all your Kobo eReading apps and devices.

If you haven’t downloaded the Kobo app already, I would highly recommend you do so. And, if you download it before March 27th, you will receive two free kids and teen titles: Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight, and Treasure Hunters. How awesome is that?

Find out more about the Kobo Kids' Store, like Kobo on Facebook, and follow them on Twitter @Kobo. Speaking of Twitter, you should mark your calendars now for a live Twitter chat on March 20th at 12:00 EST. Details below: