The School Corridor Tatler

Teaching children to read fluently and with comprehension is a long, complex process that school heads and teachers need to understand.  There are many factors that are involved in becoming proficient readers. One of the factors that influences children's reading proficiency is the extent of their world knowledge. The greater the children's experiences of the world around them, the better are their chances to comprehend books more effectively. Build children's cultural capital Let us focus on how children's limited background knowledge blocks them from developing their reading and comprehension skills. Children who come from poor homes, are often not exposed to a variety of experiences as children from middle class homes. Their world knowledge is generally restricted to the experiences in their neighborhoods.  Teachers recognize these gaps, but they ascribe the children's lack of knowledge to laziness or an unwillingness to think. "I...

For the past three years, we have been actively promoting independent reading at our schools.  In 2013, Colleen Diedericks, then the Foundation Phase Subject Adviser, and I implemented a Literacy Improvement Strategy in our circuit. The Literacy Strategy was designed to meet three objectives. THREE OBJECTIVES OF THE LITERACY STRATEGY Firstly, we wanted schools to explore and interact with research that sought to explain how schools themselves entrench low literacy levels because of organizational and classroom teaching problems. Secondly, we aimed to help schools expand their peer networks so that they could have access to more resources and support. Thirdly, we believed that a corporate book reading campaign would help to galvanize school's literacy improvement programmes and energise them to lift the reading levels at their school. That is how the Reading 40 Books Per Learner Campaign came into being. Let me give you an overview of the build up to launching the Re...

 This Human Rights Day, I want to add a special celebration rainbow for schools that are increasing the number of books that all their children are reading. You may know that I serve primary schools in the poverty-stricken areas of Lavender Hill, Steenberg and Retreat. We are not here to lament the odds that are stacked against such schools. We are here to celebrate these primary schools that are becoming active Reading schools. Growing Reading Schools This is the third year that we are passionately driving our Reading Books Flywheel with our Primary schools. Our goal is that each learner should read a minimum of 40 books per school year. That means one book per school week. As part of our support to schools, we tailored specific activities to discuss research on reading with SMTs. We studied the literacy challenges in South African schools and created peer learning networking like the Reading symposium that  Colleen Diedericks, our Foundation phase subject advisor co...