Bonus: The inside story on school readers
Bonus: The inside story on school readers
Learning to read versus learning to love literature
There’s a certain pattern to the questions that are asked in the Your Kid’s Next Read Facebook community – to the point where, after six years, the YKNR Team can almost set our watches by some of the queries.
This pattern is where the BINGO questions for the Your Kid’s Next Read podcast come from – the evergreen queries that we know need answering time and time again.
And none of these is bigger than the vexed question of school readers – those little books given to children to help teach them to read can cause big problems for parents.
At the beginning of the school year, we see questions about how best to use them and how to make time for reading out loud.
By the middle of each year, there’ll be the first inklings of ‘are they always this boring?’.
By this time of the year, the queries about ‘can we read something – anything – else?’ begin – but we’re also reaching ‘report time’, and so anxiety around levels and progress might begin.
Megan and Allison had a lengthy discussion about school readers in episode 17 of the podcast, and it’s well worth a listen.
But we also wanted to provide a hands-on, read-any-time resource.
How a book for beginner readers is written
In her book ‘Raising Readers: How to nurture a child’s love of books’, Megan asked award-winning author Pamela Rushby, who has written more than 200 books, including many, many educational texts, to explain the process of writing a book for beginner readers.
As Pamela explains in this example:
“A brief I received for some beginner reading books asked me to write a story about ‘weather and its effect on people’. I had 120 to 150 words to do this.
“I needed to include certain high-frequency words at least eight times in the text. I also needed to include a phonic element and/or a vocabulary element from a given list. Oh, and it would be nice, the brief concluded, if I could manage to be funny, too.
“Quite a challenge.”
Pamela goes on to share the secrets of how she did it.
Learning to read versus learning to love literature
The same section of Megan’s book also addresses the vexed question of learning to read versus learning to love literacy.
And because it’s essential knowledge, we wanted to share it with our Your Kid’s Next Read newsletter subscribers. All subscribers, as a bonus post.
Fortunately for us, UQP, the publishers of Raising Readers: How to nurture a child’s love of books, agreed, and have provided us with this exclusive extract – direct from the book – for you to download (PDF) and peruse.
Here it is.
This extract from 'Raising Readers: How to Nurture A Child's Love Of Books by Megan Daley' is reproduced with the permission of the publisher UQP. Text is copyright Megan Daley and Pamela Rushby and may not be reproduced or distributed without permission.
But wait, there’s more…
One thing we’d like to point out is that the REST of the book is just as useful, practical, informative and entertaining, so if you like it, you should most definitely buy yourself a copy.
This is the blurb:
An essential and practical resource for parents and educators, Raising Readers contains everything you need to know about childhood literacy, written by award-winning teacher librarian Megan Daley.
Some kids refuse to read, others won’t stop – not even at the dinner table! Either way, many parents question the best way to support their child’s literacy journey. When can you start reading to your child? How do you find that special book to inspire a reluctant reader? How can you tell if a book is age appropriate? What can you do to keep your tween reading into their adolescent years?
Award-winning teacher librarian Megan Daley has the answers to all these questions and more. She unpacks her fifteen years of experience into this personable and accessible guide, enhanced with up-to-date research and first-hand accounts from well-known Australian children’s authors. It also contains practical tips, such as suggested reading lists and instructions on how to run book-themed activities.
Raising Readers is a must-have guide for parents and educators to help the children in their lives fall in love with books.
Paid subscribers to the YKNR newsletter are reminded that they have our permission to reproduce YKNR content for school or classroom purposes (eg: newsletter or handout). The following credit must appear with this copyright material.
”This extract from Raising Readers: How to Nurture A Child’s Love of Books by Megan Daley is reprinted with permission from Megan Daley, UQP and Your Kid’s Next Read. Find out more at yourkidsnextread.com”
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We’ll see you again on 5 November with news, reviews, interviews – and the winner of our November Big Bookmail Giveaway!
Here’s what’s on offer this month (one winner takes all!), and all you have to do to have a chance to win is to be a subscriber (free or paid).
See you then. Allison, Allison and Megan.