Reading for Pleasure E-Book

Kenny Pieper

• Herausgeber: Independent Thinking Press
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In Reading for Pleasure, Kenny Pieper has gathered a range of tried-and-tested strategies to get kids reading, and enjoying it. We hear too often that kids don't read any more: Kenny thinks it should be every teacher's mission to prove this isn't true. In a squeezed curriculum it can be tempting to accept pupils' lack of reading and make excuses that there is not enough time to give to the 'luxury' of personal reading. Teachers do this at our peril. Reading is the essential building block of further literacy development as well as a skill, hobby and habit that we can take with us forever. Kenny Pieper takes the act of reading for granted, as many - but sadly not all - adults do. You're reading this right now. However, this isn't the case for everyone. Kenny teaches kids whose lives are terrifying obstacle courses of reading-related problems. They know they struggle with reading so they try to avoid reading at all costs. They leave school, not merely unaffected by this strange reading thing, but saddled with a great deal of emotional baggage about being an outsider, even more entrenched in a belief that reading is for others more intelligent than them. Then there are the children who can read perfectly well, but chose not to, unconvinced of the importance of reading in their lives. What difference does it make to them? We have to answer that question in school. We have a duty to put an end to illiteracy and aliteracy. Kids need reading role models and, as a teacher, that role model is you. You may be the only adult who that reluctant reader will ever see reading. Teachers are critical in giving all children the gift of being able to read well and to value reading. Topics covered include: the author's personal reading journey, how reading enabled him to become the first person in his family to go to university and convinced him that fostering a love of reading is his moral duty as an educator, illiteracy and aliteracy, reluctant readers, book reviews, prioritising personal reading by devoting ten minutes each lesson to it, habitual reading, the reading environment, interest inventories, technology, e-readers, Accelerated Reader programmes, recommended reading, building a class library, bookmarks, book tweets, book speed-dating, libraries, librarians, literacy and class inequality, parental involvement, podcasting, reading records, reading dialogue journals, the rights of the reader, reading aloud, silent reading and literacy and gender, amongst others. The benefits we can all reap when kids become confident readers who read for pleasure are obvious. Discover strategies which will: get kids talking about books, get them thinking about books, get them reading books, encourage independent reading, develop literacy skills and establish a classroom culture where reading is expected and celebrated. Suitable for primary and secondary teachers, leaders and SENCOs, or just anyone with an interest in or responsibility for getting kids to read.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR READING FOR PLEASURE

Kenny cares for his students and the stories that they encounter. Passionate about the power of narrative, he guides us through a rich seam of strategies and ideas for developing the reading habit and deepening children’s inner world. Surely, this book will speak to every English teacher’s heart – the possibility of growing a love of reading that will last long after the school gates have slammed shut.

Pie Corbett, teacher, author and storyteller

Reading for Pleasure is a clarion call to teachers, librarians, school leaders and even parents to make much of reading because it matters so much to the present and future lives of our children. This book is rich with evidence, pragmatic insights and practical strategies to enhance reading for pleasure. Read it for pleasure, then act upon it with purpose.

Alex Quigley, English teacher, author of The Confident Teacher

This is no bombastic ego-driven polemic designed to gain notoriety or attention for the writer but a genuine exploration of what it is that prevents young people from engaging with reading and, importantly, what we can do to help break down these barriers. Kenny offers ideas and suggestions but doesn’t ram these down your throat or at any point suggest that he is the font of all knowledge, preferring instead to share what’s worked for him and see if you might like to try it. Everything from reading programmes to e-readers is discussed fairly and carefully, with seventeen years of experience of both readers and the act of reading in mind, by someone who clearly holds the written word dear and wants to open up the beauty of it to all.

Colin Goffin, Executive Vice Principal, Inspiration Trust

A blistering, honest, thought-provoking and funny read. Only Kenny could write about something so important yet still manage to reminisce about the likes of Kenny Dalglish, Bill Hicks and Debbie Harry along the way and even equate the Greek philosophers to the Godfather actors! I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Tait Coles, Assistant Principal, Head of ITT across a group of schools in Bradford

Reading for Pleasure is a great antidote to some of the common problems surrounding reading in schools today. In the last twenty years, the world we live in has dramatically changed. When I was growing up in the 1980s, I could have easily read a whole book in the time it took a game to load on a computer. That was the Sinclair Spectrum for you! Today, students have instant access to games, films and other media. So, how do you get students to read books in the modern age? How do you get students reading in an age when you can have an instantly engaging experience at the click of a button? Thankfully, Kenny has some practical, easy-to-use and sensible remedies.

Chris Curtis, Head of English, St John Houghton Catholic Voluntary Academy

Reading for Pleasure is packed with good ideas and suggestions, many of which I shall pass on to others with the recommendation that they read Kenny Pieper’s book. Within 24 hours of reading it, I found myself quoting him in front of several hundred teachers. It is so refreshing to find a book written with such clarity by a practising teacher and this book reads as though Kenny is there, with his coffee, beside you in the staffroom, talking to you.

Ros Wilson, education consultant and author

Kenny Pieper is the English teacher you wish you had. Wise, funny, quietly encouraging and patient, Kenny’s prose makes for a comforting accompaniment into what is both a memoir and a call to arms. Bigging up reading’s an easy win with teachers, but not so much with disgruntled Glaswegian teens. We could argue about whether the ‘for pleasure’ part matters all that much – maybe the ability to read is more important than the desire to do so – and if there were a sure-fire formula for getting people to do things they didn’t want to do then its discoverer would surely rule the world. But, if anyone can, Kenny can. This is a useful and, dare I say, pleasurable addition to any teacher’s bookshelf.

David Didau, education writer and speaker

Kenny shows how, with ‘time, patience and love’, teachers may plant seeds which will flourish in the year to come. This is a book for all teachers – not just English teachers, and it is not just about fiction – and it powerfully communicates the central message that, ‘creating the environment for children to become readers who read, because they enjoy it and value it, must be the backbone of any education.’ All teachers and trainee teachers, in all subject areas, whatever their level of experience, could benefit from reading it – and to do so will be a pleasure.

Jill Berry, former head teacher, leadership consultant

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To every kid who has ever walked into my classroom and listened to me rattling on about reading, I thank you. You make me a better teacher every day. To my colleagues in the English department of Duncanrig Secondary School who tolerate me, while shining brightly, raising the bar of every pupil who walks through our door and helping them achieve more than they thought they ever could, I thank you. To Phil Beadle, who took a punt and whose late night tweet, along with priceless sweary editing and encouragement, made this whole thing possible for me, I thank you. But, most of all, to Elaine. My heart, my soul, my life. Without your unconditional support and faith in me, I could never have got here.

FOREWORD BY PHIL BEADLE

Shouting about how good you are seems to me a sign of little more than insecurity and immaturity. There are a lot of people in British education using channels to let everyone else know how good they think they are. If they were really so free from the lacerating self-doubt that nightly plagues them in their sleepless and sweaty beds, they wouldn’t be showing off quite so obviously, and self-praise, as my dear old mum would say, is … well, y’know.

Social media, and specifically Twitter, is a distorting mirror that can turn us into Calibans. There are those who use it to boost their careers, those who use it to display the plumage of their egos, those who use it to be disagreeable and there are those, like Kenny, who use it to learn, to make friends, to find out things that will make them a better teacher than yesterday.

Kenny is a mature and developed adult who understands that part of the responsibility of being a man is to behave with quietness and with strength, to question inherited opinion, to devote one’s self to something outside of that self. He is a devoted teacher to the students he serves and understands that keeping things simple is a work of great intellectual complexity. I admire him and think him a better man than myself.

His book is, I think, much like the man himself, a quiet and understated gem. It is a human work glittering with empathy. Kenny recognises the part that a love of reading has played in his own transformation from blue collar worker to white collar littérateur and holds a hand down to younger humans so that they might use reading in the same way that he has: to transform their circumstances and their outlook, to enrich their experience of being alive by communing with the human frailties, doubts and poetry of others who have recorded their souls on paper. In working on this book together, we have been very much in symbiosis: two working class adult males trying to pass on a tradition that we both benefited from greatly, making obscure gags about seventies footballers, having an occasional lighthearted swear up. I regard Kenny Pieper as the epitome of decency and a valuable and engaging (and engaged) voice on a subject of profound political importance. After reading this book, so will you.

Phil Beadle

CONTENTS

Title PageAcknowledgementsForeword by Phil Beadle1.Books and Me2.Ten Minutes3.The Library4.Taking It Up a Notch5.The E-Reader6.Talking About Reading7.Writing About Reading8.The Reading Habit9.Boys ’n’ Books10.Every Day’s a Reading DayLast WordBibliographyIndexCopyright

Chapter 1

BOOKS AND ME

It was contagious! Seventy pages!1

I BLAME ALEX DICKSON

Back when I was a lad, before the Internet and the Twitter and the Facebook, I had nothing but a little silver radio to keep me company. With one tiny white earphone to stick in my ear, I would listen to the local station, Radio Clyde, every night as I drifted off to sleep. It was a different time; don’t judge me. On certain evenings, Alex Dickson would talk to me in the strangest, deepest, most exotic (but still unmistakably Glaswegian) accent about books: strange adult books, detective stories, historical fiction, biographies. I totally and utterly fell in love with them.