The passage in ‘The Weirdstone of Brisingamen’, where the children escape through tunnels barely wide enough to wriggle through, is so well-written and exciting that I had to pause after reading it to recover! If you don’t enjoy a book, you will have a hard time enthusing and engaging your children in learning from it. All of us have read books that leave us breathless as we tell someone about the ‘best bits’. Fortunately, help is out there in the form of some great websites. However, finding books that children want to read, or authors that excite them, can be difficult the choice is endless and time for searching out texts is not. Although there is a greater focus on skills teaching in the current curriculum, there is far more freedom to choose the genres that will provide the context in which to learn and apply those skills.
So the underlying message in the English curriculum – that promoting reading for pleasure is vital – is one that every teacher would echo. We are all well aware of the link between reading and writing: good readers are most likely to be good writers. If reading is a pleasure for them, children won’t see it as ‘work’, but as a way of accessing a wealth of information and opening door to other worlds. Research carried out for The Reading Agency has found strong evidence that reading for pleasure can increase empathy, improve relationships with others, reduce the symptoms of depression and the risk of dementia, and improve wellbeing throughout life. Studies have found that reading for pleasure is more important to a child’s educational achievement than their family’s wealth or social class. Kerry Godsman is Lead Adviser for Primary English at HfLĪ love of books is something we all aspire to develop in the children we teach.
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