How time flies… and it’s almost that time of year again – time for you to brush off your bookshelf and join us for the seventh annual Kindalin Reading Challenge! Running from May to September each year, our Kindalin Reading Challenge is a fun 20-week reading marathon and a highlight of the Kindalin event calendar.
This great event is a key component of our Preschool Program, encouraging early literacy, a love for reading and inspiring your children’s curiosity about the world they live in.
We’ll be reading plenty of great stories in our Kindalin centres and we encourage you to get involved at home. This is an excellent opportunity to bring more reading into your home, and strengthen the connection between your child’s family life and their days at Kindalin.
Kindalin’s Top 5 Tips for Reading to Children
- Read daily! And start from an early age. As well as enhancing children’s language and literacy development it also promotes a strong social attachment and bonding experience between parents and children.
- Talk about what you have read. Ask questions – what is their favourite part of the story and why? This encourages their understanding (comprehension) skills, which are important in reading development.
- Make the connection between the written text and spoken word by pointing as you read to develop their emerging literacy understanding. Rhyming books (like The Gruffalo byJulia Donaldson) can assist with children’s phonemic (sound) awareness.
- Encourage children to use the illustrations as a clue for the story’s events. “Picture walks” of stories (telling the story via pictures first followed by reading the words of the story) encourages their emerging understanding of the concepts of prediction and developing literacy awareness that print (words) is used to tell the story.
- Make it fun, choosing their favourite stories. Encourage them to explore books written by the same author, or use similar books to explore their interest further. Their favourite books can be used to link to other experiences , like shows of their favourite books or visits to areas of interest that are featured in stories, e.g in Alexander‘s Outing by Pamela Allen, they visit major Sydney landmarks including the Art Gallery and Botanical Gardens.
To join The Kindalin Reading Challenge at home your family can choose to read books from your collection or include books from our author studies and regular ‘Book of the Week’ titles – you can find these on your Centre Noticeboard.
As books are read we will be asking for the children to record the title of the books on a their Reading Log. In the last week of each month children are asked to bring their Reading Log into Kindalin.
The Reading Challenge will finish in September. Upon completion of the challenge the children will receive a certificate of participation and a book.
It’s time to hit the books everybody… Ready, Set, Read!!!