So one of the great ways to think about reading for pleasure, to start off with,
is the benefits that it brings,
and we know one thing for certain: that if children read widely and often
it has many many beneficial effects for them.
Some of those we can say while it's in terms of attainment in schools,
some of it might be in terms of how they learn empathy,
how they learn to extract meaning from what we call texts, in other words from books
or from other kinds of texts like poems or plays and so on
and we know that when children read widely and often across the genres,
so not only storybooks, not only say graphic novels, but also some non-fiction,
when they read like that it gives them this huge repertoire -
that's the word that's useful to use, a huge repertoire
of almost unspoken knowledge that comes from these books
and one of the reasons why is because they learn by reading for pleasure
the power of interpretation.
So you have to make books available,
you have to give time for choosing,
you have to encourage private, silent reading, so people find the benefit of doing that,
you have to avoid close-ended questions that simply have yes/no answers to them when you read a book,
so you have a chance to speculate about things like what might happen in a book
or what you found fun or what would happen if you could interview the writer,
what would you ask the writer?
Act out books, make the books come alive by doing performances of one sort or another.
Get parents and the community involved in lots of different ways,
maybe put book reviews on a school blog, on a school bulletin,
get people recommending books to each other.
Get parents in to talk about
maybe the books that they liked as child,
regular trips to the local library if you're still lucky enough to have one,
regular trips to the school library, modernise the school library so it's a whole school policy,
whole school community policy
and ideally find ways to hook up with other reading for pleasure schools.