When most people think of book censorship, they imagine political regimes and potentially book burning in Nazi Germany. What is little considered is that most books that have been challenged or banned are books for young people.
Reading instruction in the classroom is a key concern for all teachers and there are many ways to go about it. However, is our determination for excellence in reading skills in our children killing their love and enjoyment of a good book?
The reader who loves literature of the past seeks to forge intimate connections with those who are no longer alive. In reading, we feel ourselves able to get up close and personal with a dead author.
Chronic environmental noise, like cars zooming past or airplanes overhead, can make children struggle with reading comprehension and affect their memory.
There is a chasm between the research knowledge base about reading literacy and teachers’ classroom practices. Standardisation could be a big part of the solution.
Engaging boys in reading can be tough. Many parents find that their boys either aren’t interested in sitting still long enough, or they often perceive reading as a “girl thing”. The consequences of boys…
One in three adults in the UK – or 16m people – rarely or never read for pleasure. A new survey of 4,164 adults, including both those who read and those who don’t, found that adults who read for just 20…
A recent US survey commissioned by the children’s books publisher Scholastic found that 65% of 6-11 year olds prefer to read print books even when e-books are available on tablets. In the UK, a National…
As the warmer weather settles in we know that it isn’t long before children are free of the restraints of school for another year. The regular reading that is a part of many children’s school day suddenly…
The nature of reading books is changing: the closure of traditional bookstores indicates that paper book sales are in decline. It is easy to feel as though this will discourage children from engaging with…
It’s little wonder that we often feel as though our kids aren’t as successful with reading as we’d like them to be. The “reading wars” - the battle between sounding out words and using the sentence as…
Reading for pleasure as a child has been powerfully linked in research to the development of vocabulary and maths skills up to the age of 16. But does reading still have a part to play in the breadth of…
Two initiatives aimed at getting children to learn and read more have just launched with a flourish. The $15m Global Learning Xprize pits teams of innovators across the world in a competition aiming to…
A series of binary discussions has been plaguing early reading instruction for quite some time now: phonics versus whole language, reading for pleasure versus reading for learning, digital versus paper…