Kia Garriques

There are hundreds of book clubs up and down the country for both young and old that regularly meet to discuss and dissect every aspect of a book. However, most people would probably say that we don’t particularly have a reading community in this country.

Reading a book is still seen as something only intelligent or privileged people do and the love we may have for books when we are young can easily disappear when we learn it is no longer ‘cool’.

If we want every child and teenager in the country to be reading a book then we, quite simply, all have to work together to achieve this. Parents, teachers as well as the government need to support the nation’s children in whatever way they can so that a section of their day is devoted to reading.

Most schools do their best to provide new reading books each week and provide reading assistants for children to learn to read out loud and this is fantastic. Most of us would not be able to read this now if it were not for those brilliant helpers.

Parents also need to work with the schools to keep the momentum going. Reading with their children and asking them what they liked and didn’t like about the book is going to encourage them to read more. No one knows a child better than their parents and so they need to use this to decide what books will excite their child.

All of this can be easily achieved if schemes are run which have had a lot of thought gone in to them and are not rushed through just to be seen to be doing the right thing. Book lists and materials for book clubs for schools will no doubt help them endlessly and if they could work in a weekly book club in to their lessons it will make reading part of every child’s routine.

Reading books provides us with numerous skills; argumentative, literacy, social, reading and plenty more that we all need to succeed in life. If we can all work together to show children the joys of reading then not only will we be creating a reading community of the future but we will have also created a community of parents and teachers with one common goal. We are often told that community has gone out of the window but we can find it again if we can find something we are all passionate about and, for us, that is most definitely reading.