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Otto Foundation launches inaugural Children's Book Award sagoodnews.co.za - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sagoodnews.co.za Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Celebrating National Library Week with the Launch of a Delightful Reading Journal for Children sagoodnews.co.za - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from sagoodnews.co.za Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Ladbrook said children must be able to identify with the characters in a book to develop a love for reading. “If you give a 10-year-old boy a fiction book with a character he can’t identify with, he’s not going to read it. We cannot say he’s not a reader. That’s not fair. We need to find out what he likes reading,” Ladbrook said. A study by educational researcher Dr Stephen Krashen found that children who read for enjoyment have better academic outcomes and better results in reading, vocabulary, grammar, writing style and spelling. Referring to a 2016 International Reading Literacy Study report which showed that 78% of grade 4 pupils cannot read for meaning, and listed SA last out of 50 countries, Ladbrook said: “These kids are being excluded from being active citizens if they can’t read basic things around them like a road sign or a newspaper headline or instructions at a hospital. It’s frightening.” ....
First published by GroundUp. Learners who have already lost many months of schooling because of the Covid-19 pandemic are being dealt a second blow, as donor funding shifts away from literacy initiatives at a time that schools need these most. Lunga Nqadolo, managing director of The Bookery in Cape Town, says donors have understandably been focused on school nutrition and protection against Covid this year. Yet this is a time learners need books, libraries and literacy initiatives more than ever, to help them catch up lost time. “We need to feed them and then teach them,” she says. The Bookery, founded in 2010, has been building and stocking libraries at poor schools in the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and Gauteng. So far, it has opened more than 80 libraries and distributed more than 300 000 books countrywide. But this year, says Nqadolo, like other similar organisations, The Bookery has not been able to use traditional fundraising. ....