Parents and teachers should read between the lines and help children to discover the beauty of books in a creative way, writes JANET HOWIE.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
BEEN deciphering any dots lately?
For many Border families who received their child’s NAPLAN results this week, interpreting the various graphs can be a challenge.
While opinions vary on the worth of the annual national testing regime, they can serve to focus attention on wider issues.
Such as how well your child actually can read and write, whether they might need extra help and what can be done at home, in school and beyond to make sure that assistance is available.
Not that most people need some government test to know if their son or daughter may be struggling with their letters.
Educator Jane Carrington, the owner and founder of Albury tuition centre The Literacy House, says parents tend to discover this in a far more personal way.
“They gain their knowledge from sitting at home with their children and their children trying to read and not getting there,” she says.
“Or the children’s tears and frustration because things aren’t going right, and they rightfully so give much more weight to that than the NAPLAN.”
Ms Carrington says many reasons could lie behind these difficulties, for example sight or speech issues, environmental factors or different ways the brain learns to read.
“Home stability is something that has been hammered for years as a cause of, (but) in my experience I have seen children being read to, having the maximum support possible and still for whatever reason they don’t find reading easy,” she says.
“So it’s a bit like putting together a puzzle, is it this or is it that?
“That takes time and it takes a lot of commitment, really, from parents to drive it.
“Schools can’t do all that, they don’t have the time or the resources to do that.”
Ms Carrington says a good foundation of learning is imperative and develops through a combined effort.
“It’s a societal thing, literacy,” she says.
“It comes back to a good partnership between the parents, the educational system that they choose to be involved in and an awareness in their environment how of important basic reading and writing is.”
This sense of partnership is key to a three-year Victorian government project, Linking Learning Birth to 12 Years, with Wodonga announced in June as one of eight locations taking part.
Wodonga West Primary School principal Jocelyn Owen, who is part of the project’s executive group, says the $240,000 initiative brings together Wodonga Council, government primary schools and other stakeholders, “which include parents as their child’s first teacher”.
“Looking at ways that we support families and young children as well as educating families about how to actually support their children with literacy development and understand how critical they are to their child’s development,” she says.
Illustrating this is a statistic that indicates a child with a perfect attendance record for all seven years of primary school will still have spent less than 15 per cent of their life at school.
Mrs Owen says the Linking Learning project, still in its development stage, will build on programs already occurring in Wodonga and acknowledge there is room for improvement.
Encouraging general language development and achieving a consistent approach will be among the priorities.
“Hopefully a seamless approach that in the past we haven’t been able to have,” she says.
“Just having a literacy-rich environment is another challenge.”
Sparking an interest in books may be half the battle when it comes to improving youngsters’ skills.
Albury North Public School says their new reading lounge aims to instill this love.
“We turned an older classroom into a beautiful, colourful space that’s open before school,” assistant principal Claire Sanson says.
Children can visit the room to read and be read to, with a mystery reader from the community organised most weeks to share a book with students.
Police officers, fire fighters, authors and a pirate have been among those readers and up to 60 children join in the fun each morning.
“It can be a full house; they all squeeze in there,” she says.
Mrs Sanson, also the school’s literacy co-ordinator, says the nature of literacy has changed in recent years.
“Kids are so much more switched on to visual literacy,” she says, noting the rise of tablets and mobile devices.
“We’re really trying to promote the speaking and listening aspect as well.
“Get kids talking to one another, not just respond to technology.”
Ms Carrington says a crowded curriculum and finite resources can make it hard for schools and education departments to focus on literacy.
“We’ve still got a long way to go before reading and writing is number one but, you know, the question is should it be number one?” she says.
“We also have mental health to deal with in schools, we’ve got bullying to deal with in schools, we’ve got curriculum demands, we’ve got general knowledge, we’ve got self-esteem, physical education — they’re all number one really.”
Even so, quick action is needed if a child is experiencing difficulties in two of those three Rs.
“I guess as a parent myself I would say just start investigating early,” Ms Carrington says.
“If you’re concerned, follow your gut and go with it; nobody knows a child better than their own parent.”