Report to the People
7th August 2006
Take it as Read
If
you’re not careful, the amount of badly-written rubbish you need to read every
day - vacuous reports; unpunctuated emails; rambling memos laced with the latest
management-speak clichés - would put you off reading for life.
Thankfully,
a break at this time of year is the perfect chance to administer the antidote
and rediscover the joys of reading for pleasure.
I
got hooked on books when I was growing up, when reading was the key to endless
worlds of adventure. Today’s
kids, though, don’t need to get Treasure
Island off the shelf for that; they can simply reach for their personal DVD
player or PSP.
But,
while the competition facing books for young people’s attention has never been
greater, neither has the importance of good literacy skills - especially in the
job market.
An
effective, not to mention fun, way of getting children into books, however, is
reading with them from a young age. The
Scottish Executive has therefore invested nearly £2million in over 1,700 home
reading initiatives, with another £5,000 being announced last week to set up
interesting and innovative projects at Moorfoot and St Kenneth’s Primaries,
and Blairmore and James Watt College nurseries.
Not
only will reading with your children give them a head start at school, it will
allow them to develop a love of literature which will stay with them for life
(despite the best efforts of the compulsive memo-writers they’ll encounter
along the way). And that is a gift
far more valuable than any computer game.
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