How one Sydney school got students reading in the social media age | daniellamariewh
Like many of her friends, year 10 student Penny Jin used to love reading when she was in primary school.Year 10 Queenwood students Penny Jin and Lucy Colquhoun-Thomson with their books at the school’s library.That changed over the past two years after her school, Queenwood School for Girls in Mosman, introduced a mandatory 20 minutes of reading for all 900 students at the same time every day, regardless of what class they were in.
“We went to our principal and said, ‘If we are going to turn them back into readers we need to find time in the school day’,” she said. “You can imagine, everyone wants time in the school day, so I had to put together a really strong case as to why this would be a good thing.”“We’ve become a culture that celebrates reading, our school culture has changed,” she said. “It’s not some girls are readers and some aren’t, every single girl reads here every single day.
Principal Elizabeth Stone said the key to the program’s success was its consistent implementation and teachers avoiding the temptation to use the 20 minutes for any other task than reading. “The decline in leisure reading which used to happen in the mid-teens is now creeping down into primary years and that is clearly in my view the effect of devices; children are getting phones at younger and younger ages,” she said.
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