Timesonline Children ‘no longer reading for pleasure’
An emphasis on “functional literacy” in the classroom has left little time to read for pleasure, it was claimed.
The comments by Frank Cottrell Boyce, who won the Carnegie Medal for children’s writing following the publication of his book Millions, come as a new campaign is launched to promote reading.
When are ppl going to work this one out? Reading is important, it’s very important. I am thrilled that both my children can read. But if all they could read were functional worksheets, and they’d never picked up a book for its own sake and read it to cover to cover, I would not count their reading skills as worth anything.
Once a child can read, and choose to read, and that can be anything from the side of a cereal packet, to a Harry Potter book 😉 to an encyclopedia to a cbeebies website then the world is their oyster. If they think of reading as just a skill to be employed in a lesson and never read a word otherwise then effectively they can’t read.
I had a child like this in my class last year. She could read, but had never picked up a book by preference outside of class and hated our quiet reading sessions. I soon realised this was because she had been pushed to read things “at her level” and had never enjoyed anything she had been given at her extremely good private school. It tooks weeks to persuade her that she could start a book and decide she didn’t like it and put it back, longer to get her to realise that she wasn’t limited to one section of the shelf by age or gender or anything else. Then she took off, reading Dick King-Smith
, probably technically below her level, certainly easy for her, but enjoyable and for the first time ever, I was told by her overjoyed mum, she was picking books up and reading them at home as well as talking about what she was doing in class.
I count that as the single best achievement of my short teaching career 🙂
Did I improve her vocabulary? Probably not. Her grammar? Doubtful. Her spelling? Unlikely. But her skillset, her enthusiasm, her happiness? Oh yes.
So that girl is now a reader, and it really didn’t take much, just offering her a range of books, and persuading her to explore. The fact that I’d read aloud a book by that author, The Hodgeheg
, to the whole group and she’d really enjoyed it did influence her choice, so it would appear reading to children, even older children, is a good strategy. But you all knew that didn’t you?
Sorry, it’s a hobby horse of mine. And yet another reason why my children are staying at home, with me. Where reading is fun, not a chore.
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