I have worked at Myton for many years and have primarily been involved in the English department but since joining the leadership team 2 years ago, I have also been responsible for whole school literacy.
For those of you with children in Key Stage 3, your son/daughter will be on the Accelerated Reader program which we’ve been running since 2013/14. All the books in our school library are labelled so that students can find books appropriate to their reading age. Students at Key Stage 3 have also been reading regularly at the start of English lessons and in form time. Since our Ofsted inspection in January I have been able to develop a whole-school reading culture and as a result we have introduced Accelerated Reader for Year 9 too. We have also introduced the whole-school reading programme ‘Drop Everything and Read’, which we emailed all Year 7-10 parents about this week in order to request your feedback.
Some of you will know that my mantra is always the same: books improve our lives. So I was heartened to read yet another study last week showing that having books at home improves the life chances of our children. In a study of boys in Italy, it was found that, “boys who had access to non-school-related books grew up to earn 9% more, on average, than boys who did not have many non-textbooks around”.
However, it is not just economic success that reading enhances. More profoundly, it is the ‘soft skills’ it improves which makes reading a moral imperative for our children. Reading increases empathy. One 2014 study of the Harry Potter series in particular found that kids who read about magic and Muggles were more likely to have positive feelings about people who were different from them. The emotional intelligence that kids gain from reading helps set them up for later life. As Harper Lee wrote in her great novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”
As a result of our improved reading culture here at Myton, your child’s sense of empathy and understanding of others will broaden. In turn that will make them more rounded and successful human beings who are able to fit into a changing globalised world. And if we manage to make our children better human beings, then we will have made a difference.
Click here to return to the current newsletter
