It all started when I realized that my younger son was struggling with reading.

Not with the letters, or the words, really, but with his own expectations. He didn’t like making mistakes, and didn’t like that his older brother didn’t make many mistakes.

So he refused to read, because he wasn’t good at it.  Catch 22

Pondering this for a while, I thought - maybe if he had something to read that was really interesting, it would motivate him.

And so I wrote Bookr - http://www.undefined.com/bookr - a Flex app that lets the reader choose which characters will be in the book, and makes it more “just for them”, which I hope gives them a reason to want to read it.

I started with Star Wars characters, and have since added characters from the Nightmare Before Christmas and Disney princesses.

So far, I’ve discovered two things:
1. It does seem to work - my son loves the stories, and was very interested in making up fun combinations.
2. Because you can play the same book with different characters, there’s a fair amount of reinforcement.

If you have younger children who are thinking about reading, feel free to give it a try. You can even write your own Bookr books, and I’ll include them in the library.

Tutorial here: http://www.undefined.com/ia/bookr/

Comments and feedback are welcome.