Book Week and Importance of Reading as a Child
Time to dust off the costume box and get your children ready for Book Week!
Each year since 1945 the Children's Book Council of Australia, (CBCA) has brought children and books together across Australia through Children's Book Week®. During this time, schools and public libraries spend one glorious week celebrating books and Australian children's authors and illustrators. Classroom teachers, teacher librarians and public librarians create colourful displays, develop activities, run competitions and tell stories relating to a theme to highlight the importance of reading. You will often see parades with students dressed as their favourite book character.
Raising Children advises it is important to read to babies and young children to help your child get to know sounds, words and language, and develop early literacy skills. It can help to promote brain development, imagination and learning.
The Australian Institue of Health and Welfare advise reading regularly with children from a young age stimulates patterns of brain development and strengthens parent-child relationships. This, in turn, builds language, literacy, and social-emotional skills.
Importance of early detection of dyslexia.
Dyslexia will normally become apparent during the early years of schooling, when a child shows an unexplained difficulty in reading despite having the capabilities to learn, including sound verbal abilities. Even though dyslexia can become apparent in the early years many children are not identified and an evaluation may not be done until adulthood.
Many unidentified children develop coping strategies both positive and negative, which can disguise dyslexia. Most children with dyslexia have to work much harder than their peers to remember and apply classroom information. Some children with dyslexia pretend to be less capable than they actually are,this is a negative coping strategy. (ref: Australian Dyslexia Association)
Reading and storytelling with children