1st January 2026 The Year of Reading

Happy New Year from Alison Lester in Fish Creek and me in Sydney.

In the Chinese Zodiac, it is The Year of the Horse.

The United Nations The UN has declared 2026 as three International Years: the International Year of the Woman Farmer, focusing on gender equality in agriculture; the International Year of Volunteers for Sustainable Development, celebrating volunteer impact; and the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists, highlighting sustainable land use. These observances aim to raise global awareness, promote action, and empower communities and individuals working in these vital areas for sustainable development. 

Each year in the library, we usually start the displays with something connected to the Year being celebrated, such as the Year of the Horse for 2026 on the Chinese Zodiac, or the Year of Volunteers as proposed by the United Nations for 2026, but the year that I think is the one we should be celebrating, is the one that the U.K. is celebrating, The Year of Reading. The UK campaign brings together a range of partner organisations, from publishers and Government departments to Literacy charities.

Reading for pleasure in the UK is in sharp decline, with only 

50% of adults reading regularly—a 13.8% drop since 2015—and just 1 in 3 children (32.7%) enjoying reading in their free time, the lowest in two decades. Key drivers include social media, lack of time, and reduced engagement among young adults and boys.   Like here in Australia, the UK has changed the way they teach reading in schools. They put more 

emphasis on the strategies espoused by the Science of Reading (SoR) research and their five 

pillars of Early Literacy Skills.

In the process they downplayed Reading for Pleasure, the role of the school library and the importance of reading with other enabling adults such as parents.  Now that they have realised their folly, once again there is a 'big push' in the UK for schools to ensure they have Reading for Pleasure as a clear outcome for students. Teachers are being trained to heed the Reading for Pleasure research. Here in Australia we need to do that too. We need to stop the school systems, and schools who feel they no longer need a school library, a trained teacher librarian or any form of Reading for Pleasure program before it is done and becomes impossible to reinstate.

Reading isn’t just a hobby; it’s a powerful tool linked to stronger writing skills, better well-being, and even higher lifetime earnings. In fact, research shows that children who become proficient readers can earn substantially more over their lifetime.

By making reading a daily habit, we can help lay the foundation for strong literacy skills and ensure every child has the opportunity to thrive. Schools and parents owe this to children and one of the easiest ways to do this is to model reading. They need to make time and value that reading to children time.

Of course this will not be easy to do, but the longer we do not espouse Reading for Pleasure and put school strategies into place to make sure it happens, the harder it will be. The UK plan has lots of ideas to offer Australian teachers and teacher librarians for parent information sessions, ideas for school staff meetings and ideas to use in the classroom.

If reading is to become a lifelong habit then people must see themselves as participants in a community that views reading as a significant and enjoyable activity. Overall, the research highlights:

• Children who know adults who read for pleasure take it for granted that reading is a valuable and worthwhile activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991)
• The home environment exerts a significant effect on academic motivation, which is over and above that predicted by socio-economic status (Gottfried, Fleming & Gottfried, 1998). Thus, children whose home environment is more cognitively stimulating have higher academic motivation than children whose home is lacking such stimulation
• Parents who believe that reading is a source of entertainment have children with more positive views about reading than parents who only emphasise the skills aspect of reading (e.g. Sonnenschein et al., 2000)
• Children of parents who believed that reading is a source of pleasure had greater reading motivation scores in primary school (Baker & Scher, 2002) and
• Children are more likely to continue to be readers in homes where books and reading are valued (Baker & Scher, 2002).

Yes, this a 'hotchpotch' of my thinking, but as I plan for the school year ahead, I am as adamant as always that the key to school success lies with a school executive, teacher librarians, and teachers who read, value reading and promote reading to their stakeholders.

Let's do it!

1st November Fairytales Losing Out to AI-Driven Apps (SMH Spectrum pg 12)

Reading for Pleasure -a door to success

Today there is an article in our Sydney newspaper written by Jane Sullivan asking the question Why aren't more young people reading for pleasure? She suggests some reasons, admits to parents being time-poor and lacking in knowledge of what to read, talks about an AI app that writes stories for reading at bedtime. She does say that it is not ideal. Of course it is not ideal, reading to your children is also about the special bond that is established while you read and the chance to touch a book, talk about what is on the page and relate it to your own life. Reading to your child cannot be out-sourced to a device! They need to see you read. You have to model reading, so that your child thinks that you think reading is important and worthwhile doing.

Jane Sullivan mentions a report from the National Institute of Education in Singapore which recommends a number of strategies to tackle the problem of declining reading skills and enjoyment among young people.

• better access to books that reflect children's lives.

• support to enable them to choose books for themselves.

• quality time set aside for reading.

• opportunities to reflect and share their experience with other readers.

• development of a positive reader identity.

The emphasised words are me, not the report. All of these things point to the importance of school libraries and a knowledgable teacher librarian who is able to facilitate all of these strategies. There is a difference between a public library and a school library. The public librarian can certainly recommend books, but the teacher-librarian should know a child's interests, approximate reading ability and want to broaden their choices so as to increase their reading stamina, empathy and vocabulary. 

Of course these strategies will be enacted upon by classroom teachers and parents as well, but the teacher-librarian needs to make this their priority. All school libraries should facilitate parent borrowing. Schools need to make it very easy for parents to find books to read to their children and if they can do it when they drop off or pick up their children they are more likely to do it. 

I am the teacher-librarian in a school library that caters to preschoolers and children in Kindergarten to Year 2. This enables me to give the students access to to books that reflect their lives. All classes come to the library weekly, but the parents can come before and after school to borrow ten books at a time. Most parents come weekly or fortnightly. At the beginning of the year we encourage the families to take part in the Premier's Reading Challenge, but most parents keep coming even once they have finished the challenge. I also run parent workshops and have a parent newsletter which ensures they are well informed about what the library and library staff can offer them.

Learning to read is a partnership between home and school. Parents who read to their children daily long before school, set their children up for reading success. Then the school takes on the task of teaching children the important skills they need to decode, comprehend and evaluate what they read, while there is still a reading culture occurring at home and their is support with choosing books in the school library.

This week I attended a breakfast at which Natalie Wexler, a respected American educator spoke. She is a proponent of evidence-informed literacy education and has recently spoken about how 'teaching phonics is not enough'. At the end of her talk she was joined on the stage by Erica Stanford, the Minister of Education in New Zealand and Lorraine Hammond, an advocate for the Science of Reading and explicit instruction. 

Erica Stanford spoke about the curriculum situation in New Zealand with much knowledge, passion and determination to get it right. I found this wonderful, but given the push towards a knowledge-rich curriculum, I thought it sad, that New Zealand had made the decision not to have primary-school-based libraries. When I visited New Zealand last, they were leaning towards bulk borrowing from a city-based school library where schools requested books and could keep them for the term. I wanted to ask her if this has changed.

Many states and Education systems in Australia are also closing school libraries or talking about why they are needed. Some schools have volunteer parents buy and loan the books. Many schools have also done away with time set aside for reading, such as USSR (Uninterrupted Sustained Reading) or DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) time, citing lack of time, but if we want students to read at home, we need to give them time to read at school. 

Reading for Pleasure revolves around personal enjoyment and the inherent pleasure of reading itself. It is a voluntary and self-directed activity driven by individual interests, preferences, and curiosity. It is not bound by specific guidelines or requirements and allows readers to choose their own materials based on their personal tastes, preferences, and reading level. Before a child can read, the choice to read is made by parents or other adults such as teachers. Once a child can read adults need to make sure there is an environment where children choose to read.

Literacy levels and reading for pleasure will continue to decline if schools do not ensure that the five strategies above are easy to implement!

23rd July How to Get Children Reading Again by Emma Jacobs

This is the title of an article which appeared in the Financial Review on the 18th July. It was written by Emma Jacobs who is a London-based freelance journalist, producer and researcher. She  writes features with a particular focus on work, changes in the workplace and office life, but here she is writing about the future of reading, reading for pleasure, libraries, and bookstores.

Emma started her article by citing a school in England that makes every effort to remind students of the joy of books. They are read to every day, visited by authors and encouraged to pick out books to enjoy in their own time. Nicki Duckett, the teacher who oversees reading at the school, which has as its ambition to marry the “skill” and the “will” to read. In the 20 years she has worked in education, she has observed how the proliferation of gaming and smartphones, a busy school day, plus extracurricular clubs and activities create “more demands on children’s time”.

This is true in Australia too. Schools organise extracurricular clubs before and after school and even at Lunchtime. Students have their time managed for them by their parents and their school. Students are no longer allowed to be 'bored'.

Emma quotes English research that shows that children’s reading enjoyment has sunk to its “lowest point in two decades”, but then adds the decline in Britain is emblematic of a trend across the Western world.  The English government is reviewing the curriculum and under its broader “plan for change”, there are “ambitious targets to ensure more children start school ready to read”.

Emma talks about the provision of school libraries and how their numbers are reducing. She mentions the difference between girls (39.1%) and boys (25.7%) who read for pleasure. She states that from birth, parents are less likely to buy books as presents for boys than girls or to take boys to a library.

The article then goes on to look at some initiatives that are being trialled in the hope that reading joy is experienced by more people, but like the two previous newspaper articles that I commented upon, here and here, she emphasises that reading with children also helps cultivate good habits. She cites these figures, a minority, 41% of under-fours are read to frequently, down from 64% in 2012. 

So another article that is imploring adults to read to children more often! Teachers give parents permission to do this, they constantly remind them to, but when will education authorities and schools give teachers permission to read to students more than they are now?

Students need to be able to touch and read physical books. This means parents and teachers need to read from books, not devices, they need to visit libraries and bookstores (not online bookstores), there needs to be books in every classroom, some extracurricular clubs need to be using books, adults need to be passionate and proactive about reading and not make it an addendum 'if we have time'. Reading or being sent to the library should not be a punishment ...'if you don't finish your work you can go to the library to do it'.

Why have schools stopped their USSR (Uninterrupted Silent Sustained Reading) or DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) times? Schools that still have them are doing so much better in the reading for pleasure realm.

The Final Chapter Good Weekend July 5th 2025

The Final Chapter is an article by journalist Greg Callaghan which is published in the Sydney Morning herald's magazine Good Weekend today. It doesn't say anything that passionate literacy and English teachers didn't know, but once again it highlights some of the trends in schools today. We need to do something about Reading for Pleasure!

Schools have made the change towards teaching more systematic phonics in the early years of school, but this doesn't make children readers. It means they can read, but will they choose to read when there are so many other things vying for their time? What is the role of parents in the reading continuum? What is the role of libraries, especially school libraries and teacher librarians? This article talks about this. Children need to hear good examples of oral reading. They need to be exposed to a wide variety of reading resources and yes, this can include eBooks and reading on devices, but not to the exclusion of books.

If I plan a library lesson and it doesn't include me reading something to the students they say, 'but you didn't read to us today, we can't go yet'. More than ever students are enamoured of being read to. It is almost a novelty for them. A kindergarten mum once said to me, 'I wasn't aware that I am meant to read to my child!' We still have so much parent education to impart. So why are school getting rid of libraries and teacher librarians? Why are there school principals who think a school library needs none to very little funding for books? Why does the new NSW English curriculum advocate reading to students and giving students time to read for themselves, but then fills up the time allocated to English with so much teacher instruction? Teachers constantly say 'oh there isn't time to read', we have so much to get through in the published units of work'. 

This also means teachers are not reading much for themselves, unless it is prescribed. If it is prescribed, it then is published elsewhere such as on Spotify, Story Box Library, websites, etc, so teachers do not have to read it. They listen and watch with their students. I am not blaming teachers for doing this, I am just saying if we want teachers to be engaged in their own learning they too need time to explore what is on offer and build their own field knowledge of books. If not, then that is the teacher librarian's role and s/he needs to be able to read to students without other staff members thinking that that is not the best use of their time. 

In a staff meeting held in the library and run by me, I asked teachers to list 6 Australian authors or illustrators of children's books, thinking that would be easy. Yes they know Aaron Blabey, Anh Do, Alison Lester and Mem Fox then it became harder. 6 non-Australian was easier. They know Dav Pilkey, Roald Dahl, Julia Donaldson,... 6 children's poets? Some hadn't even heard of Michael Rosen, so we have to spend more time on building the field and reading it. I tried to run a book club for teachers on the staff and I got six staff to come once a fortnight and we did picture books and short novels, but not one classroom teacher came, citing they just do not have time. 

Schools (and families) really do need to look at their priorities. The parents who frequent our school library generally have children who revel in reading. They are the students that do well at the end of school. I met a mother of a past student in the supermarket this week and she was so excited to tell me that he was doing an English degree and had rediscovered the joys of reading. We do not all have to have or do an English degree to love reading, but it does start at home and in the early years of school. We need to 'catch' children and make them 'readers for life'. Schools need to make it easy for parents to read to their children. Schools need to make time for reading.

The UK has falling literacy rates as well, but it has realised phonics is not enough to make readers. They are implementing Reading for Pleasure programs in schools. Some schools in Australia have had the benefit of input by advocates such as Margaret Merga and they too now stop everyday to read at school. See Queenwood's Just Read program.

Thank you Greg for this article. Hopefully parents and teachers will read it and lobby their schools to do more about Reading for Pleasure so that they too realise what you wrote in your conclusion

'Multiple studies have shown that those who read for pleasure for 30 minutes or more a day enjoy higher self-esteem, a substantially lower risk of depression, are less lonely, and 58 percent more likely to empathise with others.'

5th June Aidan Chambers (27.12.34 to 11.5.25) Reading for Pleasure

Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

Aidan Chambers

Recently I read about the death of Aidan Chambers, an author/educator who had a very profound affect on me as a teacher. When I was a young, inexperienced, but very passionate teacher who was very involved in the Primary English Teachers' Association I went to a workshop run by Aidan Chambers in Sydney. He outlined his Tell Me Framework  using examples to show how each of his questions might work. The next day, back at school I tried it out with my Year 5 class using Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. After the basic questions, I asked How long did it take for the story to happen? Well, I have never had a more vigorous discussion with students. It was a mixed ability class including five non-reading boys.   There was a group of students who were convinced that it took a year and a day times two at least because that's how long it took Max to sail to the place where the wild things were. There was a group who thought it was only minutes because Max's dinner was still hot when he got home. One student said minutes because that is how long it took me to read the book. Then quietly, one of the non-reading boys said I think it was a month, because if you look at the moon pictures in the book it goes through the phases. He had studied the illustrations very closely. Then we had to go back and revisit the story to debate all these views. In the end we spent over an hour on this. I know that is a luxury in today's curriculum-heavy classrooms, but it did two things.

1. Converted me to the power of Book Talk, and 

2. Taught me to never underestimate my students' opinions.

I was already 'into' Children's Literature because I had done it as a subject at university during my Undergraduate English degree, but as I undertook a Master's of Children's Literature I had Aidan Chambers in the back of my mind informing my thinking and classroom practice. After a  stint teaching teachers where I read to them every session, I went back to a school as a teacher librarian.

Every session in the library with students convinces me of the importance of the reading environment, the importance of unknown texts chosen by a well-informed adult and the importance of giving students time to talk about books.

This brings me to why I believe schools need teacher librarians who read widely and who are very aware of authors, illustrators, translators, Children's Literature and Reading for Pleasure advocates. There should be a difference between a school library and the local library. At school I often have to remind some of the staff of this fact ...I am a teacher first and a librarian second.

Aidan Chambers said this eloquently in his talk Making Readers

For their part, children expect their teachers to know more than they do, and to know how to help them get to know more for themselves. They expect librarians to know about books and to know which books it might be worthwhile reading now, today. They expect the adults who are responsible for them to know how to help them go where they cannot go on their own. Children know what they want to read for themselves. They tell each other about those books. It hardly needs a paid professional adult to help them do that. What they want from professional adults is guidance about reading they would not have thought of, do not hear about from each other. 

I think I am very good at doing this, but I butt heads with parents who think their child should only read and borrow what they like to read. They can do this at the public library. At school I expect that they will borrow 'a free choice book' which might be 'pulp' fiction, a graphic novel, a book from a loved series, a book a friend recommends, but I also expect them to take risks, try new genres, read nonfiction, biographies, poetry... and my book talks and book displays enable them to do this.

I am not adverse to children being taught phonics as a means to learning to read, but phonics is not reading. Reading is a lifelong experience. You get better at it, not by learning rules, but by reading everyday and doing it because you enjoy it. Phonics doesn't make a reader. It aids reading, but as teachers we want our students to love reading and schools need to reproduce the warmth, diversity and engagement that we see in families that read together. If we create this we will have students who read for pleasure from a wide variety of books and do so because it is pleasurable.

19th March International Read to Me Day

March 19th is International Read to Me Day, a campaign encouraging children to ask adults - parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, teachers - to read to them! Inspired by an African proverb, Emma Mactaggart from The Child Writes Fund reminds us, "It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a child to inspire a village." The occurrence aims to empower children to take responsibility for their own literacy, but also to ask for more support. Wondering how to partake in the event? Simply promote reading activities within your community!

Having time to read with a parent or caregiver isn’t just about the activity of reading. It’s about having consistent, focused time together, without other distractions or demands. Even a few minutes of reading together gives both you and your child a chance to slow down, connect with each other, and share an enjoyable activity.

By reading to your child starting at a young age, even before they’re able to communicate verbally, you help lay the neurological groundwork for effective language use and literacy. That’s partly because books expose children to vocabulary and grammar that they wouldn’t normally hear.

Young children whose parents read to them daily have been exposed to at least 290,000 more words by the time they enter kindergarten than children who aren’t read to regularly. And depending on how much daily reading time children get, that number can go up to over a million words.

There’s no reason to stop reading to children either, once they’re able to read themselves. They often enjoy hearing books a bit above their ability level, for example hearing chapter books when they’re still reading picture books on their own. Reading together through elementary school supports their developing literacy and helps children develop empathy. As children read books about people whose lives are different from their own, they gain an appreciation for other people’s feelings, as well as other cultures, lifestyles, and perspectives.

When parents who borrow from our school library ask for reading recommendations, as well as suggesting novels for the family serial,  I suggest they borrow from the Empathy Box. Here we keep books that appear on Empathy Lab UK  booklists as well as books from the Inclusive Books for Children, the IBC lists. These books allow parents to read about children whose lives may be very different from theirs, but they also allow children to find similarities with children who appear very different.

The other place I send them is to the nonfiction shelves because nonfiction has changed so much since they were students. Our library has a big collection of narrative nonfiction like biographies and beautifully illustrated information books which can be dipped into or explored thoroughly depending on the child's interest.

At the moment the parents who visit the library are reading Premiers Reading Challenge books, as their children are in Kindergarten to Year 2, but that will change very soon as most of them will have read thirty books by the end of this term and be looking for other sources of good books.

Reading to children with expression, at a leisurely pace and with room for chatting is ideal, but if you want more, this book Read With Me  by Samantha Cleaver and Munro Richardson outlines the ABCs of Active Reading:

Ask questions 

Build vocabulary

Connect to the child's world

and you will create a lifelong love of reading.

24th April Children are forgetting the joy of reading books

As children and teachers go back to school this week in New South Wales, tucked away on page 18 of the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday, there was a 'news' article that was headed 'Children are forgetting the joy of reading'. It was written by journalist, Catherine Naylor and on further reading of the article it implied that this was because of children spending time on screens. It is far more than this!

Firstly, children are not forgetting the joy of reading. Many of them haven't yet got that joy to forget. While I have been teaching the English syllabus has had many iterations and it is in the process of being changed yet again. The K to 2 section is now mandatory. The changes overly stress phonics as the first essential of reading. While phonics certainly is important, the first elements of reading that should be stressed are JOY and PURPOSE. Why do we read? Why do I need to read? Successful students read and they read for pleasure.

I teach in a K to 12 school and I get great pleasure reading the Year 12 results when I see that a student who has done well is a student that I taught and she or he was experiencing joy in reading in Prep School. I know then that I had a role in that student's education. I love it when they or their mum or dad tells me about them as a reader and the impact it has had on them. This happened to me recently at a school student get together in a pub.

While I am prepared to admit that many teachers need help with how to teach reading, they also need more than the mechanics. They need knowledge of children's literature, they need to be readers themselves and they need to know how to make reading fun. Yes, the fun has gone out of reading. When I see a smart board screen with one letter (sound) in the middle of it and students articulating that sound over and over, I do wonder if they know why they are doing that.

While walking this week with a teacher colleague, she was bemoaning the fact that a lot of the theatre had gone from teaching. She said 'to me teaching is a performance' and when I watch  and listen to some of my fellow teachers I think that there is a mundaneness about their teaching. And yes, that may be because they have too much on their plate, but I also think that it is because they no longer 'own' what they teach. It is fine to be given units of work to follow, but to teach something verbatim means that it s not yours. 

NESA has provided teachers with sample units of work in the new English syllabus which are supposed to ensure that they cover all elements and outcomes of the syllabus. But many schools are adhering to them as if they are the panacea to English education. They are written by teachers so they have flaws and play favourites just like all teachers do. Who says that the books suggested in these units are the only books or the best books that you should or could use to teach that outcome at that stage level? These units fragment the curriculum and make the day even busier than it already is and many students are failing to transfer these skills across curriculum areas. Be brave choose your own texts and relate them to your unit of inquiry or some other area of the curriculum. Show your students why and how this can be done.

Secondly, if it was as simple as saying that the joy has gone because of screens, then all of the teacher librarians who have done their best to promote e-reading and have provided a myriad of book titles that students have access to via screen would be saying that students can get the joy of reading from a screen. Many of my adult reading friends do read on screen, but that is not where they got their initial joy of reading from. They got it from their parents, another family member,  a teacher, a teacher librarian, a peer, in other words another enthusiastic reader who loves reading and books!

The school library I work in, has always loaned books to parents. This is because we see teaching reading as being a partnership between home and school in the early years of schooling. We encourage parents to supplement their child's choices with things that they may not choose to borrow themselves. We work hard at ensuring the books on display change regularly. We organise displays by genre, theme, author, illustrator, world events, school events, International Days and sometimes even by something as simple as a colour, word or letter. When we have a display based on a word or a letter, the students have great pleasure in telling me why those books are a group... all these book tiles have e.g. the word 'why' or the word 'no', all these titles are about things that start with 'p'. The students know that I am asking them to engage with reading.

We also endeavour to get teachers into the library. Of course we have our diehard borrowers, but it is hard to get some teachers to even walk through the door of the library. We have tried giving them book bags each week. We have left books on their chair. We have advertised books at staff meetings. We have gone above and beyond with bulk loans for their classrooms, but if the enthusiasm isn't there and time isn't made for reading 'real' books as opposed to 'readers' the joy of reading will not be 'caught'.

Unfortunately, some teachers and curriculum co-ordinators have interpreted the new curriculum to mean that it is not necessary to read whole texts, an extract will suffice, and that sustained silent reading (SSR or DEAR) is not necessary, or actually is a waste of time until a student can read. These teachers are missing two things in their teaching repertoire... JOY and STAMINA. If they read to their students, then their students want to read (look) at those books themselves. They want to peruse the finer details in the illustrations. They want to peruse the layout, the font, the things that make that book special.

Stamina is also learned. Students need to be able to sit, focus and be with a book for extended periods of time. Many students I teach love being read to, and they can sustain being read to for long periods of time but when they are reading to themselves they run out of stamina to do it for a lengthy time. They start to fidget, skip forward in the book, ask to go to the toilet, want to swap books etc. Yes, this may be because they cannot read what they chose, but it could also be that they have not had opportunities to do this. If the teacher starts small, uses a timer and makes it a game, each day the period of time can become a little bit longer until students can entertain themselves with a book rather than a screen. Use wordless books (see Pinterest) where the student has to make up the story themselves. Use books you have already read to them or old favourites they know and can 'read' themselves.

Catherine Naylor says that "the portion of children aged 5 to 14 who read in their spare time has fallen by more than six percentage points in just four years, from 78.5 per cent to 72.4per cent." I think that is most probably because of COVID when students did get very used to using screens and had less access to books from school, but watching students in my library over the last ten years or so, students certainly look for shorter books and books that are funny. Why? Well it goes back to stamina, but it is also what they are exposed to. Pulp fiction in the supermarkets is short and funny and cheap. Teachers and parents have to expose them to more and that is why the provision of extended JOY goes back to parents and teachers. Some students are reading, but I think they could be enjoying reading a wider range of books.

The students at my school are very lucky. The libraries are very well stocked and their is a great range to choose from, but not every school or classroom has this and if the curriculum says 'literature' is important, it should be more specific about the role of the school library, the classroom library and the teacher modelling reading. Every teacher needs to read Megan Dowd Lambert's book, Reading Picture Books With Children so that they know what they are modelling. The curriculum shouldn't be interpreted to mean every teacher librarian has to buy multiple copies of the books that are used in the sample units and deplete their meagre budget for other books that might excite students. Let teacher librarians do what they should be doing, enthusing students, teachers and parents to read for pleasure.

On that note, I have watched what's happening in the UK very closely. They went down the track of a much more didactic curriculum and closing of school libraries and now years later there is a big push for 'reading for pleasure' in schools and the online groups of teachers asking for help with that are immense.

I have just noticed that my friend at Momo Celebrating Time to Read has also written about this newspaper article, so read what she has to say as well. She certainly has a PASSION for reading and children's books and I do know that not every teacher will be like her and me, but there does need to be a lot more passion associated with the teaching of literacy. We want children not only to be able to read, but who also choose to read long after your interaction with them.

It is a sad indictment when you read the blurb for this wonderful book:

Now consider: When talking with children about their reading lives at school, are you likely to hear about this transformative reading joy? Or are you more likely to hear about reading logs, book reports, and standardised tests? For too many young readers, reading is joyless. It is something that is required of them, but not something that they choose to do.

14th February Library Lovers Day

I had fun at school today! I wrapped a book up in a parcel for each class and left it on the teacher's chair in the classroom for the class to find at the start of the day. I pasted the Library Lovers Day heart and International Book Giving Day logo on the parcel with a heart-shaped  note suggesting that they enjoy sharing the contents. All of the books I chose were about reading for pleasure and they were given out at random to my twelve K - 2 classes. Four of the teachers gave me very positive feedback and several children came to the library to thank me for their book. They guessed they were library books because of the spine labels and covering! Yes, it was a bit of an effort, but well worth it, if the students respond positively to the library, books and reading.