When you can read well, you don’t even think about it. You just do it.
When you can’t read well, life can easily turn into a series of dead-ends. Starting with Grade Four, when you suddenly encounter subjects in a new language.
We keep hearing that, officially, three out of four children aged 10 can’t read for meaning.
And yet, reading is not difficult to do – if you can just overcome a few small obstacles. Like:
- Reading in another – very difficult language. English.
- Reading in an alphabet that you didn’t learn (or hear) when you were in pre-school and early learning.
- Learning to read with a teacher who has 45 children in her class and an impossible heap of admin to get through
- Learning to read when there are very few books in your classroom, in your school, in your home and even in your community where there is no functioning library.
- Learning to read when nothing interesting is put before you to read.
- Learning to read surrounded by sound. There is little quiet to make switching into a book possible. Easier to switch on a screen instead,
Children’s Book Network believes – and has successfully tested for 14 years now – that children are hungry for reading, hungry for stories. We underestimate them when we think they are satisfied with second (or even third) best. They WANT to read and they want to think critically and imagine. They need the freedom that books offer them – to go somewhere else in their minds. To be someone else in their future.
We want to help make that happen.
HOW?
Our themed workshops make reading fun and make learning about reading, writing and books interesting. We encourage curiosity and free-thinking, allow children freedom to choose what they read and give them privacy around what they write.
Our Reading Toolbox Project offers a five-year reading plan designed to be flexible, adaptable and written to the children themselves. There are 12 themed Reading Companion Books that accompany a selection of the best books we can find in the world, and particularly in South Africa.
