Why it’s imperative to get children into reading and writing

In this Year of Giving, pass the gift of reading for pleasure on to a child, to a friend, to a colleague.

Let me start by saying I am not an expert. My qualifications, if any, are that I am a mother of five children and a grandmother of four. I am, however, an avid reader and have been all my life. I have my parents to thank for my love of reading. They both read to me from the moment I was born and they did this every day.
I repeated the same reading habits with my own children and then they did with their own children, and it worked — three generations of book lovers.
It costs very little, except a commitment from parents of time and the willpower to make sure the TV is off, mobile phones are hidden in a drawer, and there are no distractions — 15 minutes a day.
Why does it matter, you may ask? Isn’t that what they go to school for, to learn to read?
It does matter and yes, they go to school to learn to read, but who can give them the priceless gift of falling in love with books, long
before they go to school? You can. Through reading and being read to, our children can dream and imagine and learn better. As a young child, I knew how difficult it was to climb Swiss mountains and so many other things, just from reading Heidi. My early love of horses began when I read Black Beauty.
There is a large body of research that points to evidence that a child who reads regularly for pleasure will be more empathetic, more tolerant, have a wider vocabulary and outperform his or her peers, not just through school, but in terms of careers too.
So in this Year of Giving, pass the gift of reading for pleasure on to a child, to a friend, to a colleague. Why not start with the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. The team and I pride ourselves on curating a programme of more than 250 events to ensure that there is something for everyone, in terms of genres, topics, and languages.
> What: Emirates Airline
 Festival of Literature
> When: March 3-11
> Where: InterContinental Festival City
 www.emirateslitfest.com
 
 
Isobel Abulhoul OBE, CEO & Trustee Emirates Literature Foundation