06/12/2023
A little blog I wrote for my website:
The outstanding importance of reading.
Or
"What can I do to help my child do well in school?"
This is the phrase I have heard many people, including my sister, ask me. From all the experience I have as an English and Literacy teacher, this is the response I give them: read with your child. You MUST get your child reading.
It's that simple!
Reading is one of the building blocks for life. When my students at school ask why I am always trying to get them to read more, I reply that having the ability to read allows you to not be a stranger in your own country. The ability to read allows one to read a bus timetable, choose a coffee, buy or rent a house and of course, communicate in a job. These are the basics, before we then get into appreciating and analysing a text for its form, themes, tone or imagery - all these come later - as long as a child can read.
So how do I get my child there? Let's start at the very beginning as Julie Andrews would say...
Fill your house with books. With picture books to talk about, with rhymes, stories and of course… The Gruffalo!
Next, make reading a pleasure, yes, they can't read yet, but they will associate book reading with fun and being cosy with mum or dad. Parents of young children feel permanently knackered, i know, but this is time very well spent, I PROMISE you! It can be built into the day, coffee with mum or dad at ten, read a book before bed - A BRILLIANT habit! I always left a book or six in the car, so that the children could browse through on a car journey and feel less bored stuck in traffic. Sometimes I would dig out a few forgotten books from the bottom of the pile, then one of my kiddies would 'discover' this new book several hours later.
Don't be fooled into thinking effort at this age isn't very meaningful. In tests carried out, students with higher literacy levels when asked, could not remember their first book. Those with much lower literacy could; it was almost always a good book studied in school, what's the relevance? Those with high literacy could not remember their first book, because books had always been around.
What are the drawbacks? There are of course drawbacks, otherwise all the world would be a Shakespeare.
Cost.
Books cost a lot, no getting around it, which in these straightened times is a very topical issue. There are several ways around this. Buy second hand, first of all. Charity shops are heaving with brand new, possibly never-even-opened books. For the bargain price of five pounds, I could be the owner of three or four wonderful books. Amazon - the used and new selections are wonderful, look up many of the favourite books right now, and you will find you can buy books from Walliams, Pichon, Rowling and Morpurgo for the price of a coffee.
Failing this, or possibly instead of, I cannot enough extol the delights of a library! For the price of NOTHING, your kids can read their way through hundreds of pounds’ worth of books, absolute gratis.
The cost to us, the parent or carer.
Now this one is much harder. We can sit with our child, we can enable them to acquire a functional level of literacy, but as they grow older, the skills involved in being a higher-level reader, require a quantity of time spent reading that is not just about doing the minimum until Year 5 or 6. Do we as parents, read for pleasure and entertainment? If we don’t, that habit will pass down, and reading will become something we need to do, but not outside of the classroom. By limiting reading as a thing that has to be done, but not for life, only for English, a child loses the chance to learn and grow by immersing him/herself in another world. Boy in the Striped Pyjamas for example, we not only read a good book. We learn to empathise with Shmuel, pity Pavel, witness the hypocrisy of Bruno’s Dad, the brutality of Kotler and the harshness and horrors of a concentration camp. All this, in a book.
Now, students inevitably slow down their reading progress around eleven upwards, simply because their lives take on so many other activities and interests, including phones! If it becomes a battle, try keeping it small, ten minutes a day. Try some form of reward, (snacks perhaps!) and try not to be too prescriptive with what books they read. Whilst any fiction is wonderful, if they enjoy non-fiction writing, get a book about a motorcyclist, or a mountaineer, or a film star. Every different book, magazine or newspaper brings a new word, new experiences, new understanding.
Not only will variety help students become more vocabulous (Just made a new word there), but the stakes for being a good reader are quite high. The English exam boards aim their GCSE exam syllabus at a reading level of 15 years and 7 months. This is aspirational, especially when one considers that the average age of a GCSE student entering year 10, will in fact be around 14 years old. This is not just, I suspect, just an English syllabus thing, most likely all subjects will have their literacy levels. To be trailing round with a lower reading age, will hamper a student when they are tackling the content that makes up all of their GCSEs.
This is all very well, but what if I as a parent, have literacy issues? All you can do is the best you can. While children are young, the culture of having books is invaluable, and libraries do the most amazing book reading meets, where you and your child can get support and interact with books in a way that you might not perhaps manage alone. In early years and infants, if you can listen to your child practise their book, and or get family to read with them, that is just as good – reading is reading! For children those who may in the future, need a diagnosis of a special need, better that they make the progress that they can, and highlight the need earlier, as a Special Educational Need rather than simply lack of practice. Twenty mins is often the recommended amount for a child to read each day. If we take, let's say Child A, who reads for standard 20 mins per week day, not surprisingly, this makes 100 hundred reading minutes. Let's take Child B who reads for approximately twenty mins a week only, as an average. By the time they enter Year 6, Child A has managed 21,000 mins (or 350 hours) of reading, and Child B, 4320 mins (72 hours). This is a massive gap. (Taken from a newspaper article) Many students I meet, are simply a few hundred hours behind - this is an easy fix. Statistically, a child can gain up to two years' progress in one academic year, if they stick to regular reading like this, and my students make progress by reading themselves higher.
And what do I as a parent do, if my child has an aptitude for reading? Feed it. Enable your child to read as wide a variety of material as possible, newspapers, fiction, non-fiction, new prints, old books. Show the films of the story, to create interest. Get involved with local challenges like the Summer Reading Challenge. Offer incentives (bribery) to get them involved! One year, I realised my son was polishing off three Tom Gates books in an hour and saying he had completed the challenge, so I asked them to choose harder books and get a reward from me too. A well placed Burger King meal can work wonders for commitment… The Week Junior is brilliant for topical information, and there's a non-fiction book out there for every subject a child might be interested in.
There is so much more to be said on the subject, and indeed I shall, in one of my further blogs. I hope you found this helpful. If you would like to see a full suggested reading list, please feel free to go to www.writeontution.co.uk and go to Free Stuff. If you have a secondary school child and are either concerned for their progress, and would like to see some cheap, affordable English tuition, or if you home school and would like some home schooling resources or just general English help, then please look at my website. I have created website subscription access to personalised tuition designed to help students along in their course, gain help designed specifically for them to enjoy, make progress and achieve further.
