Happy World Book Day 2021!

Picture this: a child with a bewildered expression, maybe your child, is sitting at school attempting to write sentences showing the correct use of given connectives. Next she has to write a story using adverbial clauses, and other requirements. She is struggling. And why? This child has rarely, if ever, enjoyed a bedtime (or any other time) story, nor developed a love of books.

A child learns to speak by listening and mimicking those around her. Similarly, she acquires a love of books, learns to write expressively and understands the exciting possibilities of our language through a wide experience of both reading and listening to literature. Without this experience, the main language absorbed is the day-to day chatter as used by her family, friends, and TV.

Now picture another child in the class, who at ten-years-old still enjoys the nightly stories that have been his delight since babyhood. Now that he is a good reader, the stories read to him are a little more advanced than the books he reads to himself.

This happy ritual has sent a 'pleasure message' to his brain, a kind of commercial, conditioning him to associate books with pleasure.

The literacy exercises are no problem to him because he has by now absorbed so many different styles of written language that the grammatical rules he is taught at school make sense. This boy cannot wait to start writing the story that is already forming in his mind.

As a literacy tutor, I am often asked to help children having difficulties with writing tasks. Their parents make superhuman efforts to organise tuition whilst forgetting the one activity that is free and pleasurable: reading a bedtime story every evening.

Last week a new parent came for her ten-year-old son's second lesson after a similar conversation the previous week. Her face was shining. "I've been reading to the children every night this week," she said, "and it has been absolutely wonderful.

They already go and wait for me on our special reading cushion. I had no idea it would be such a joy for us all".

As Roald Dahl wrote:

"So please, oh PLEASE, we beg, we pray,

Go throw your TV set away,

And in its place you can install

A lovely bookshelf on the wall. "

To which I would add:

Reach for a book, (this cannot fail),

And read your child a bedtime tale.

For if you read one every night

He'll be happy, confident and bright."

Happy story-times to you all!

Diana Thompson is a specialist teacher in creative arts, and teaches on the team at Laidlaw Education

For more information and activities on World Book Day visit www.worldbookday.com