Clare Sealy: '4 steps to ensure pupils read for pleasure'

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Debbie_Hepplewhite
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Clare Sealy: '4 steps to ensure pupils read for pleasure'

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Much emphasis is put on 'reading for pleasure' - sometimes promoting the 'love of reading' as the route for children being able to read.

Once children can read technically and independently, however, does that mean they will choose to 'read for pleasure'?

Clare Sealy provides suggestions for teachers to facilitate and encourage reading for pleasure:

4 steps to ensure pupils read for pleasure

It’s essential we promote reading for pleasure, but it’s not easy, says Clare Sealy
https://www.tes.com/news/4-steps-ensure ... d-pleasure
If you had any doubts about the importance of reading for pleasure, a quick look at the research would settle them instantly.

The OECD report into reading in 2002 found that reading enjoyment is even more predictive of educational success than familial socio-economic status. The difference in reading ability between a child who reads for pleasure for 30 minutes a day and those who never read was more than a year.
Given that one in five parents does not spend any time reading with their children and over half of those surveyed spent less than an hour a week doing it, for many schools it is down to us to build that culture.

We need to help children build an emotional relationship with books and that means trying to replicate, as far as one can in a classroom with 30 children, the experience of snuggling up with a trusted adult and a wonderful book.

Talking about the book together is important – how else will children realise that reading can be an enjoyable social activity? But we need to make sure this does not turn into another literacy lesson. Reading aloud should not be linked to other "work".

We need ‘to recognise the affective impact of reading to "reassure, to entertain, to bond, to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity, to inspire" (Trelease, 2013:04). This is about the building of spiritual and moral capital.
Being the sort of teacher who can inspire every child to enjoy reading is grounded in hard work. It involves a different kind of rigour from that involved in planning a geography lesson, for example.

Yet behind both is a need for excellent subject knowledge. Acquiring excellent subject knowledge in children’s literature requires a rigorous commitment to read it on a regular basis.

Developing excellence in being able to promote reading for pleasure is just as grounded in hard work and developing requisite subject knowledge as any other aspect of developing one’s professional repertoire.
Do read Clare's four suggestions and the whole piece.
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