There has been a substantial decline in the number of children who read for pleasure in the last few years. According to the annual Kids and Family Report, in just the last four years, the number of kids that read for fun has dropped by nearly 10%. Today, barely half of the children in the United States report liking to read for enjoyment.

When it comes to reading, kids can come up with a million excuses as to why they don’t like it. It can be frustrating trying to get your child to read, and it’s easy to rely on unsuccessful methods for encouraging reading. Sometimes you tend to nag (唠叨) your child to read, or perhaps bribe(贿赂) him to read by offering him a reward. Unfortunately, these methods often do more harm than good. Nagging can lead your child to feel that he is being forced to read. And while rewarding your child for reading isn’t bad in itself, it shouldn’t be relied upon to get him to read.

It’s similarly important to reserve judgment regarding what your child chooses to read. While it might be your goal for your child to read To Kill a Mockingbird, reading about his favorite band in a teen magazine will also do. Reading is reading, and the more your child does it, the more he will enjoy it. And with increased enjoyment comes more frequent reading.

The first step in getting your child to read more is to help him enjoy doing it. The best way to accomplish this is by providing him with something that he wants to read. Besides, what you do will highly influence what your child does. If you read for pleasure, it establishes the notion (观念) that reading is fun. Research shows that children who are surrounded by readers – their parents, siblings, friends, or teachers - are more likely to become readers themselves.

A librarian in Indonesia's Java Island is lending books to children in exchange for rubbish they collect in a novel way to clean up the environment and get the kids to read more. Each weekday, Raden Roro Hendarti rides her three-wheeler with books stored up at the back for children in Muntang village in exchange for plastic cups, bags and other waste that she carries back.

She told Reuters she is helping develop reading habits of the kids as well as make them aware of the environment. As soon as she shows up, little children, many accompanied by their mothers, surround her "Rubbish Library" and ask for the books. They are all carrying rubbish bags and Raden's three-wheeler quickly fills up with them as the books fly out. She is happy that the kids are going to spend less time on online games as a result.

Raden said,“Let us build a culture of literacy（读写能力）from young age to reduce the harm of the online world. We should also take care of our waste in order to fight climate change and to save the earth from rubbish.”She collects about 100 kilograms of waste each week, which is then sorted out by her colleagues and sent for recycling or sold. She has a stock of 6,000 books to lend.

Kevin Alamsyah, an eager 1l-year-old reader, searches for waste lying in the village. “When there is too much rubbish, our environment will become dirty. That's why I look for rubbish to borrow a book,”he says.

The literacy rate for above-15-year-olds in Indonesia has been around 96 percent, though a report by the World Bank warned that the pandemic(流行病)would leave more than 80% of15-year-olds below the minimum(最低的）reading level.

It’s hard to believe that I wrote Number the Stars more than twenty years ago. It seems like yesterday that I answered the phone on a snowy January morning and received the news that it had won the1990 Newbery Medal (美国纽伯瑞儿童文学奖).

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I think readers of every age may match themselves with the important persons in the books they love and ask themselves: Would I have done that? What choice would I have made?

And ten-the age of Annemarie in Number the Stars-is an age when young people are beginning to develop a strong set of personal ethics (道德观；价值观)…They are beginning to realize that the world they live in is not always good and safe.

So they follow a story about a ten-year-old girl who is caught in a dangerous situation, and she must make decisions. Young readers become cheerful when Annemarie takes a deep breath, enters the woods, faces the danger, stands up to the enemy and wins her victory.

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Today, the book has been published in many countries and translated into many languages. It found its way into the hands and hearts of children who had read about but never experienced war...Books do change lives, I know; and many readers have told me that Number the Stars changed theirs when they were young, that it made them think about both cruelty (残酷；残忍) and courage. “It was something that shaped my idea of how people should be treated,”wrote a young woman recently, telling me about her own fourth-grade experience with the book.

The Danish friend who first told me the story of her childhood, and who became the Annemarie in my book, is an old woman now. So am I. We both love thinking of the children reading the story today, coming to it for the first time and realizing that once, for a short time and in a small place,a group of prejudice-free (不存偏见的) people created a touching story of love and kindness towards others.

Lois Lowry