Reading Education Gap - Closing The Gap

Close the Reading Education Gap for your gang!

Today a lot of us rely on television/movies as the story teller or computer games to engage children and us adults alike in the story. They certainly have a part to play in our modern lives but they lack the fundamental engagement of imagination. There is nothing left for the imagination in either, the personna, clothing, environment, area, time frame and people. All these things are filled in for us and our children. Possibly the only things left to the imagination is the smell and feel of things.

As an avid reader myself, I am able to get lost in a book as I am sure all readers do. The difference between watching a film or a game for us readers, is that we fill in our own imagined colours, noises, smells, the handsome, the pretty and the ugly, as defined by the mind from the descriptions in the authors tale. How rain falls or smells in a dusty land, or meat cooking on an open fire, is filled in by the author's descriptions, and by the readers memories, interpretations and imagination. Each reader interprets the information accordingly, making the tale totally unique to each individual. This experience is not available to those suffering from the Reading Education Gap.

Making the mistake of having a TV in a young child's room could scupper all efforts on your part to get them reading. It is just too easy to let the flickering images attract attention away from all else and allow the machine to be your baby sitter and story teller.

The Reading Education Gap is started when children are young. Children who have not been introduced to reading consistently at an early age, tend to battle with language as a whole. Even two year olds and three year olds pick up the concept that the writing is part of the story, and the strange but uniform symbols have meaning to them. They learn this because adults tend to point them out with their fingers. Books become a chore instead of a treat for children who battle to read. That for me is the saddest thing of all!

The biggest bonus that kids and adults alike get from reading is new perspectives to life changes or personal and social problems. Small kids quickly learn words that allow them to express themselves in ways that are understood by adults. Words allow for expression of fear, happiness, sadness and loneliness that may have hitherto been locked inside a little ones head. A story that tells a tale of fear and victory over the 'monster', be it a wolf or a witch gives children a way to express their own fears and an understanding that they too can be victorious with the help of mom and dad, brother, sister or guardian. Even happy stories give children more ways of expressing their happiness and love. Of course it is important to keep stories age appropriate, we would not want a story to scare the living daylights out of a two or three year old!

We as the parents are responsible for giving our kids every available opportunity to succeed in life. Many opportunities are lost at the off, when young adults cannot construct a comprehensible sentence. The idea that language is no longer important is the sucker punch for anyone who buys into it. Take note that most of the people at the top of their game have gone to university or at the very least have a solid education behind them. There aren't enough people who are rich and famous despite having language problems like dyslexia, to warrant the casual dismissal of the importance of language and the ability to read.

So how does reading help with getting a good job? Well for one thing, reading creates an understanding of how sentences are constructed in order to make them easily understood. As in where the sentence pauses, or stops. We get a good idea of where to apply Capital letters, quotation marks, (these keep us from plaigarisng!) or emphasis!, and where there is a query? At the very outside, getting a job usually entails having to read the job description and having to write a CV in order to apply. The person with the best CV is most likely to get the job. This does not neccesarily mean that that person with the good CV has the greatest amount of experience, but an easily legible CV is a hook to an employer who may construe this as a sign of intelligence. A job may rest upon how well a CV is constructed rather than the applicants experience. If the person applying has been unable to explain his/her experience well enough on a piece of paper they very likely will not ge the job. These days there are few face to face, first time interviews. Way too many skilled people and kids looking for first time jobs suffer the consequences of the Reading Education Gap.

Higher education teachers and lecturers dock points for wrong spellings, incorrect grammar and lack of punctuation. Some may simply put a line through the paper and refuse to mark it. This can force students to drop out as they do not have the mainstay of essay writing, an important part of higher education. Teachers in higher education do not have the time to try and make sense of an essay/paper that has no pauses and full stops, nor the time to work through lots of spelling errors. In order to put a point accross in an essay requires a good vocabulary, something that reading adds to all the time. That is not to say that success requires all of us to be a 'Shakespear' or 'Tolkien' but it helps to be a pupil of such great orators and even lesser but successful writers. Ignoring the importance of grammar, punctuation and spelling, dooms many children to a life of mediocrity. Failed dreams are part of the widening gap in education and the haves and the have nots in life. Low self-esteem in the work environment is a symptom of The Reading Education Gap. Books help to fill in the holes of the Reading Education Gap and reading subconsciously embeds the places to pause, stop and start a new sentence. Even comics use speech bubbles as quotation symbols, imagine trying to read a comic with randomly situated speech on a page with two people in it. How would we work out who said what and when, without some effort on the part of we the readers? The fact is, it would spoil the reading experience. The same goes for any reading we do, whether it is a book, newspaper, magazine or comic. Reading comics is good and great fun! Click the image below for a smile.

................................................................................................................................... If the education system is letting our kids down, we do not have to sit by and watch our gang become part of our societies flotsam and jetsam. We can close the Reading Education Gap with the help of books, comics, magazines and newspapers. The more we read the more new words we are introduced to, the more words we know the easier it is to learn!

Learning the phonetics in the english language by way of sounding the ABC chart is a good beginning, this allows children to spell a word out if they do not recognise it. New/now not so new, teaching methods have scoffed at teaching children to use sounds to spell a word out in order to pronounce it. I have witnessed first hand both flashcard learning and phonetic learning, and the end result is flashcard learning results in recognition of learned words, but an inability to recognise or pronounce new words. Poor spelling ability is another symptom of flashcard learning. Phonetic learning, results in better reading ability and pronunciation of new words. Spelling also shows improvement. You might be very surprised to find out how many adults will not read because they have never been taught to sound out new words in their heads. Once the chart sounds are known, it is easier to absorb at a later stage, the strange rules of english, the not phonetic! For instance the letters ph together, making the F sound and gh having no sound as in 'though' which actually sounds like tho'. however spelled in this fashion will not get browny points, certainly not in journalism, the sciences or any higher media education and probably not the boss...

There is a place for text messaging but it is not in letters to customers, the CEO or professionals. Only a few people who have reading and writing difficulties make it big in this world of ours and the more competitive life gets, the more strings we need for our collective bows. Close the Redading Education Gap right now and start with the babes by reading to them and telling them stories at bed time.

(1) Make time for reading and stories.

(2) Dont fold under the pressure and buy play station games for kids under 7 and then if you must, only buy one type of games box. Use some of the extra cash for books.

(3) Take books on holiday for afternoon naps for all the gang.

(4) Give books for Christmas, picture books and comics are great for young not so keen readers.

(5) Anything that has some type of reading material in it can only be a help, especially if it captures childrens attention. Experiment with books until you find the author that appeals to your child.

(6)Encourage your children to read or tell you stories when you are all together in the evenings or at week-ends.

(7) Find out how your children are being taught to read, spell and write at school. This can give you a heads-up on any extra lessons they may need. Coloured pencils at school for writing in is for babies or 4-7 year olds. Some schools allow children above the age of 7 to use coloured pens that are not entirely legible on white paper. My feeling about this is, if it is not easily legible, chances are the teacher has not marked it properly. Kids older than seven or eight should be writing in pen, either black or blue. They should also be learning about full stops, commas and spelling. If a child leaves primary school without these rules in place they have already been let down. The older they get the harder it is to instil these language rules and the less interested they will be to boot.

(8) Join a library as soon as your child is old enough to turn a page. Plastic books that don't tear are great for little ones.

(9) Close the Reading Education Gap and read, read, read to your gang.

When push comes to shove we are the ones responsible for our childrens education and if the schools are letting them down then we need to find other ways of topping it up.

Reading = stimulation of the imagination, broader perspective, better vocabulary, which in turn assists learning and that = a more rounded education and an elevated chance of succeeding in higher education. These things ultimately lead to more choices in career options.

Close the Reading Education Gap for your gang now!

Find my evergreen picks for kids aged between 4-15 below. Some are ageless classics such as Little women, Tom Sawyer and the Wind in the willows. The Harry Potter books which I suspect will become as timeless as Scrooge are for 12 and over. Disneys Scrooge is great in the format of Donald Duck and great for younger kids, (psst! and mom and dad)

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