Book-hooked on a faraway beach

Johannesburg primary school teacher NICOLA ROUTLEDGE outlines why reading is important

MY EARLIEST reading memory dates back to a family holiday when I was still a toddler. I have vague recollections of sitting next to my dad on a potty on the bathroom floor while he had his “me” time on the toilet. Already a true Daddy’s girl, I followed his every action. . . My book may have been upside down. I couldn’t read a letter let alone a word but at that moment I began to embrace reading.

By the time I was eight I was working my way through Roald Dahl’s collection (to this day I still secretly wish I could have Matilda’s psychic powers) and moving on to the works of Enid Blyton – The Mag

ic Faraway Tree and The Famous Five, Secret Seven, and Mallory Towers series – I devoured them all. I was hooked!

As I enter my 30s, I still am. For me, a good book compliments a holiday – nothing beats lying on a beach, engrossed in a book, sipping a cocktail and listening to the sound of the ocean. In the real world, I have to make do with a cheeky half hour on an evening before bed (another habit with roots in my childhood), precious moments in which my mind can detach itself from lesson plans, marking and that one troublesome child, and escape to somewhere different, where dilemmas and problems belong to someone else.

I was read bedtime stories and I am adamant I will find 10 minutes to read to my children every night. It is important that a love for books and reading is nurtured and encouraged very early on in a child’s life. Not only does it feed their imagination (and their dreams) but without them even knowing it, they begin to pick up the language and structure of stories that will eventually develop their ability to write. I’ve witnessed a two-year-old recite Julia Donald- son’s The Gruffalo. Her parents will admit that she could not read a word yet she had already absorbed the repetitive structure of the story and could retell it using illustrations as clues.

Reading is crucial to children’s development as literate citizens – if you can read a word or story, you can write it!

This is reflected in classrooms around the world. It is no coincidence that the best students in English are often those who spend any spare minute they have with their head in a book.

I still maintain that this is because, unbeknownst to them, they subconsciously soak up the structural elements and vocabulary of the genre they read.

A little part of me knows that I should ask them to cast aside the book and double-check that they have met the success criteria for the lesson but the reading geek in me can’t bring myself to, for the sole reason that I remember.

I remember what it was like to discover a new adventure series. I remember that desperate need to find out what new revelation the next chapter would bring.

I remember (and sympathise with) the frustration of wanting to leave the classroom and return to another time and place.

And so I sit and watch with a nostalgic smile on my face. . . and hope their love of reading survives “the teenage years” and continues into adulthood.

ý Visit the website www.nalibali.org or alternatively www.nalibali.mobi for more on the Nal’ibali reading-for-enjoyment campaign.