Spend at least ten wildly happy minutes every single day reading aloud. Read at least three stories a day: it may be the same story three times. Children need to hear a thousand stories before they can begin to learn to read. Read aloud with animation. Listen to your own voice and don’t be dull, or flat, or boring. Hang loose and be loud, have fun and laugh a lot. Read with joy and enjoyment: real enjoyment for yourself and great joy for the listeners. Read the stories that the kids love, over and over and over again and always read in the same ‘tune’ for each book: i.e. with the same...

Thus far, 7 blog posts on reading. After each post, I think to myself – there, that’s done with.  Apparently not! So how many surveys and legislations and propaganda pieces does it take to get this simple point across? Obviously a lot more than I have managed to squeeze into 7 blog posts. Well then, here goes… Yet another study books – this is how they work. A survey of 4th Graders, undertaken by the University of Maryland, revealed that engaged readers from economically disadvantaged homes routinely outperformed less engaged readers from richer families. “Based on a massive sample, this...

If you are a reader and a book-lover, the world can seem like a pretty bleak place right now. There’s not much good news coming in and all studies point to a doomsday looming over us all. When Giants fall And when the leading lights fall prey to the epidemic, it all begins to seem quite hopeless. Maryanne Wolf, an expert on the science of reading, is dismayed that she has, “begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed. I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels because I have lost cognitive patience.” Acclaimed writer, Nicholas Carr, concludes that use of digital media has “chipped...