National Reading Summit III was a huge success! Thank you to all participants, Vancouver partners, sponsors, speakers, and staff!

Bordeom has become the elephant in the (class) room

It began the evening of May 2 with Marcelo Suarez-Orozco’s captivating lecture, Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World. Sharing his research in the United States and Europe, Marcelo engaged in a stimulating discussion on globalization, education, and our shared future. Startling facts were brought to the forefront: Over 200 million students who should be enrolled in school are not. The idea of education for engagement, both personal and citizen, has been lost in the culture of testing, competition, and economics. The lecture was a perfect segue into the next two days; the audience was left with insightful, thought-provoking questions. How do you teach kids to love learning? How do you teach autonomy, agility, creativity? What should the purpose of education in the 21st century be?

This is about allowing Canadians to weave reading into every aspect of their lives

May 3 and May 4, over 130 participants in-person and across Canada via webcast contributed their valued input to the forthcoming National Reading Campaign and Plan. Steven Page, Canadian music icon, and Annie Kidder, education specialist, took the stage for an engaging discussion on the joy of reading and Steven’s personal experiences – he even sang a song!

The voice of a writer is the voice of a friend – Steven Page

Reading is the door to citizenship, to discovering ourselves in relation to the stories we read. Educational institutions featured strongly in the discussion, with the mutual agreement that libraries and teachers play a very important role in fostering a
reading culture. Steven went on to assert that reading is part of a full and rich life, and that we need assistance from broadcasters and media to encourage this.

The biggest lesson publishing can learn from the digital world? Let it go. – Steven Page

We are all stakeholders in the availability of cultural output.

More highlights from Day 1 and Day 2 included speakers Fabian Langelle from Library and Archives Canada and inveterate writer Max Wyman. Fabian presented the Immigration Heritage online kits initiative, thematic guides for the web generation, while Max entertained and delighted the audience with a captivating, passionate speech on the importance of reading.

“I can’t wait to go walking in the cloud” – Max Wyman on the digital world

A cocktail reception at the beautiful Vancouver Art Gallery, overlooking Robson Square, followed the day’s events. Fred Herzog’s photograph was the subject of a fierce bidding war upwards of $3300, which Bob Tyrell of Orca Books ultimately won. It was a spectacular couple of days for all involved.

Day 2 opened up with a powerful panel discussion from Simi Sara, CKNW host, Lyne Laganiere from Quebec’s Ministry of Education, Maureen Dockendorf from the Coquitlam School District, and Chris Kennedy from the Vancouver School Board.
Panelists contended that libraries need more and constant research in order to continue enriching the lives of all citizens. Reading is an intimate journey of the mind. It increases our sense of self-worth.  It encourages empathy. The joy of reading has become stifled through mandatory, formulaic school tests and assignments – this needs to change. And it can change, the panelists asserted, with the use of new technology in schools that promotes, encourages, and sustains a literary school community.

“Minimize what’s prescribed to maximize the potential. Don’t cover the curriculum – uncover it.” – Maureen Dockendorf

Jim Diorio of Manifest Communications later took to the stage to unveil the National Reading Campaign, elaborating on ad placement, target audiences, cross-Canada media, urban, and rural participation, strategies for library, educational, and media involvement, and the ubiquitous catchphrase: “What did you read today?”

Closing off the summit was Dr. Jeannette Armstrong, Indigenous author and activist. Jeannette delivered a passionate and emotional speech, stressing the need for all Aboriginal communities to be included in the National Reading Plan.

Through guided group discussion and teamwork (and over delicious snacks and lunches!), participants were able to meet others in similar and diverse industries, from publishers and writers to students, educators or librarians. We worked diligently to establish the final version of Canada’s National Reading Plan.

Be sure to check our website for full videos of the summit, and subscribe to our newsletter to receive continued updates on the National Reading Campaign. Thank you again to all involved!

16 DAYS UNTIL THE TD NATIONAL READING SUMMIT!

Wow, is time ever flying! It’s almost May!

We’re so excited to be moving forward with the 3rd and final summit in the series. Over the past 2 summits, we have worked to hone in on exactly what a National Reading Plan for Canada would look like, with help from amazing and inspiring speakers, government officials, academics, librarians, teachers, educators, bookstore owners, publishers, readers, parents, and students. It has been a wonderful, eye-opening experience for all.

On May 2 – 4, we will be in Vancouver at Simon Frasier University, Segal Graduate School of Business. And the most exciting part?

We will FINALIZE Canada’s National Reading Plan.

We are here to encourage, support and promote the joy of reading across Canada. Please join us in our cause. Click here to register today.

How?

• Attend the summit in person — $250 regular and $100 student plus HST
• Organize your own satellite location at your institution –$200 per location plus HST (includes facilitation training kit)
• Participate via webcast — $100 plus HST
• Attend a satellite location in Toronto or Montreal — $75 per personWe look forward to seeing you in Vancouver!Sincerely,
  The National Reading Campaign

Read our latest newsletter in your browser here!

Register Now for the TD National Reading Summit III – Space is limited!

Vancouver May 2 – 4

Join us in Vancouver for the third and final summit! Throughout the two days, dynamic speakers and panel discussions will provide food for thought. But the important work will be done by you, the attendees. During the summit, participants will roll up their sleeves to review a draft of the National Reading Plan. In facilitated group discussions, participants will decide how best to shape the plan and establish a grassroots movement to make reading a priority in Canada. Work has already begun on a campaign to increase awareness of reading for the joy of it. This will be unveiled at the TD National Reading Summit III.

Keynote Speaker: Marcelo Suárez-Orozco

Kick-Off Event – May 2 at 7:30 pm
Wong Theatre, Goldcorp Centre for the Performing Arts

We are pleased to announce that Marcelo Suárez-Orozco will be the keynote speaker to kick off the TD National Reading Summit! Professor Suarez-Orozco is the Courtney Sale Ross University Professor of Globalization and Education at New York University. Among other things he co-directed a study of Asian, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino immigrant youth in American society published in Learning A New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society At the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, he was the Richard Fisher Membership Fellow (2009-2010), working on education and globalization – including Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World with Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj.

Can’t travel to Vancouver? Want to participate with your colleagues?

Consider the Institutional Webcast package. Organize your group at your office, school, or library and participate with in the TD National Reading Summit III. Registration is 200 and you can have unlimited number of participants. Participants will have the ability to interact with Vancouver Summit and share their group work. Wondering what is involved in hosting an Institutional Webcast? Please get in touch at info@nationalreadingcampaign.ca

A Chance to Mix and Mingle
On Thursday, May 3^rd, join us for a cocktail reception at the beautiful Vancouver Art Gallery!  This is your chance to discuss the progress of the day, network, catch up with old friends, and meet new ones.  This is all included in your registration package.  Sponsored by TD.

Where should I stay?
The official hotel for the TD National Reading Summit is the Metropolitan Hotel Vancouver, a luxury hotel with a superb downtown location. To book online with our discounted rate, click here.

Book Count
The 2^nd annual National Book Count results are in! Did you know…

• Every second, 5 books are sold or circulated in Canada.
• E-book sales comprised 10% of all books sold in English Canada.
• Public libraries reported that 3% of their circulation comprised digital formats.
• 3,405,687 books were sold or circulated in 1 week in Canada.

The National Book Count shows that Canada is a nation of readers! But the emerging digital readership shows change is coming fast. The National Reading Campaign believes more needs to be done to foster pleasure reading and a passionate civic engagement that comes from reading. Join us in Vancouver May 2-4 to establish a National Reading Plan for Canada!

Toronto City Council An open letter

Dear City Council,

In December the National Reading Campaign and People for Education released a report on the Joy of Reading in which stated that only 50% of Ontario elementary school children now report that they “liked to read,”—down from 75% ten years ago. This fact elicited a great deal of concern and media coverage. In an editorial the Globe and Mail placed the responsibility for this on the shoulders of parents.

Children living in Toronto already have very uneven access to the things that are known to help children become life-long readers. Not all schools have resources for their school libraries (particularly those in low-income neighbourhoods), and lower-income parents lack both the money to buy books for their homes and often the time to devote to reading to their children.

And yet we know that liking to read is a critically important measure of future success in life.

There is one place where these inequalities can be addressed and where children who are left behind in so many other ways can get the chance to become life-long readers who love to read— and that is our excellent public library system.

City Council has been inundated by testimonials from people saying how vital the libraries are. Yet it is precisely in the essential areas of access to the library, reading promotion programs, and services to children, new Canadians and others that your budget committee has apparently refused to heed the advice of the library board, appointed by your current regime. How is this possible?

Torontonians have an obligation to give every child living in this city the chance to have a successful life by becoming life-long readers. Our democracy and sense of fairness demand it.

Please do not cut the library budget by 10%. It would be a highly irresponsible act as well as an extremely unreasonable one. It makes no sense.

Patricia Aldana C.M.
Rick Wilks
Co-chairs National Reading Campaign

For further information contact: paldana@groundwoodbooks.com 416 363 4343 ext. 230
To download this letter click here.


For over a decade, political leaders have been obsessed with test scores in reading, writing and math. In many jurisdictions, the scores have been used as the one and only measure of success in education. If our scores are up, the thinking goes, our education system is doing well, and our kids will be able to compete in the global economy.

But there may be a hidden danger in this narrow focus.

While the test scores are up, there has been a dramatic decline in the percentage of children who say they like to read. And reading enjoyment, or lack thereof, has an impact far beyond test scores. (And far beyond global competiveness, for that matter.)

Reading for Joy, a new report from People for Education, shows the percentage of Ontario children in grade 3 who report they “like to read” dropped from 75% in 1998/99 to 50% in 2010/11. The number of students in grade 6 who “like to read” fell from 65% to 50% in the same time period. The data comes from Ontario’s Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), which surveyed over 240,000 students in grades 3 and 6.

The report cites research from the OECD, which found that reading enjoyment not only affects students’ success in all subjects in school, but it also has an impact on students’ sense of social and civic engagement. Students who enjoy reading are more likely to read more and to seek deeper knowledge; consequently, they  develop a deeper conceptual understanding of the subject matter.

So why are kids enjoying reading less? Television and computers may be part of the problem, but it is also possible that schools’ focus on the “mechanics” of reading, and on the skill rather than the pleasure, is driving students away.

Homework  — or at least the kind of homework that can turn reading into a chore – also may be one of the culprits. There are things parents can do at home that encourage kids to become readers — but helping them with their “decoding” and “letter-sound correspondence” isn’t among them. Instead, we should be encouraging parents to simply read to their children — for fun. Reading to children is one of the top ways parents can support student success; and reading to kids — in any language — helps instil the joy of reading.

Teacher-librarians also have a role to play. A study conducted by Queen’s University and People for Education for the Ontario Library Association found that in elementary schools with teacher-librarians, students were more likely to report that they “like to read.” Sadly, the percentage of Ontario schools with teacher-librarians continues to decline — from 76% of elementary schools and 78% of secondary schools in 1998/99 to 56% and 66% respectively in 2010/11.

It’s time to make some changes in our schools. We need to start by expanding our definition of success in education. It’s not enough to focus only on targets for test scores in reading, writing and math, and it’s a mistake to think of education as merely skill acquisition that leads to work. The depth and breadth of our education affects us for the rest of our lives — our capacity to be engaged citizens, to be socially responsible, to understand ourselves and others, to be happy and to be successful in the broadest sense of the word. And reading permeates every aspect of education.

If the percentage of students who report they “like to read” were one of Ontario’s measures of success for our schools, we would be making changes to ensure that percentage was going up instead of down.

So instead of setting targets for test scores, let’s start setting targets for reading enjoyment. Let’s have schools with book clubs, thriving libraries and notes home that just say “Read to your kids — for the joy of it!”

Kids’ relationship with reading will affect the rest of their lives; it’s time to make sure that relationship is a happy one.

Annie Kidder
People for Education

By Wayne Grady

“Learning to read begins at birth,” said Clara Bohrer, an advocate for early childhood literacy in the United States. “The parent is the child’s first and most valuable teacher, and parents need to be educated to be equipped for so vital a role in the child’s development.”

Dr. Bohrer was speaking in January at the second annual National Reading Campaign Summit, a Canadian initiative that was formed to establish a national reading strategy that will increase Canada’s literacy rate. Currently Canada, at 97 percent, ranks 20^th on the U.N. list of world literacy rates, but that ranking is deceptive; it is also true that, according to Statistics Canada, 15 percent of Canadians can’t understand the labels on medicine bottles, 27 percent can’t interpret the warnings on hazardous waste material sheets, and 42 percent are “semi-literate,” which means they technically can read, but their comprehension levels are very low. The Canadian Council on Learning recently noted that 48 percent of Canadians have skills below the internationally accepted standard of literacy required to cope in modern society.

Educators are recognizing that raising the literacy level begins with very early childhood. At the moment, one child in four begins kindergarten in Canada without the skills needed to learn how to read; in the U.S., the figure is 35 percent. Dr. Bohrer is the chair of an American program introduced in 2004 to address the problem. Called “Every Child Ready to Read” (ECRR), the program focuses not on public schools but on public libraries, where children are exposed to books and reading long before they hit kindergarten. “Libraries are now seen as important resources in communities for early literacy,” she said.

Public libraries in Canada anticipated the ECRR program with their own initiatives. In 2001, Quebec instituted Une Naissance, Un Livre (One Baby, One Book), in which every parent who registers a child under the age of 12 months at a local library receives a gift-bag containing a picture book, a music CD, and a copy of the magazine Enfants-Québec. Parents are encouraged to spend time reading with their infants, not only at the library but also at home. As well as acquiring basic learning skills, children come to associate reading with nurturing, with parent-child bonding, associations that last a lifetime. After ten years, tests show that Quebec three-year-olds who have not received the gift-bags have a vocabulary of 616 words, whereas three-year-olds enrolled in the program have vocabularies of 2,150 words. Clearly, the program is working.

“Talking to a child is important, of course,” says Patricia Enright, manager of Childrens, Teens and Rural Services at the Kingston Frontenac Public Library, “but reading to a child introduces him or her to words that are not part of the parent’s regular vocabulary.”

Inspired by Quebec and the ECRR programs, KFPL has for the past four years opened its doors to pre-readers and their parents or caregivers. “Books for Babies” focuses on newborns, introducing them to stories, songs, and rhymes. “Wonderful Ones” is for walkers to 23-month-olds, and adds movement to the mix, and “Growing Readers,” aimed at 2- to 5-year-olds, continues with stories and songs and also poetry and more movement.

“These programs are very popular,” says Patricia. “We’re over-capacity in all of them. But they have to involve the parents as much as the children, and the program has to be continued at home. Parents can’t just come to the library for half-an-hour a week and expect their child to have a richer vocabulary. And we think it’s working. It’s hard to assess how much learning is going on at home, but we do ask the caregivers if they have borrowed library materials, books, CDs, magazines, for their children, and 85 to 90 percent say yes, they have.”

KFPL has also partnered with Kingston Literacy and Skills to give free books to children in the Kingston area.

The Kingston Rotary Club also recognizes the importance of early childhood education. Seven years ago, Jim Frid, a local Rotarian and child psychologist, began a program to distribute children’s books to pediatric wards in Hotel Dieu and Kingston General; since hospitals cannot accept used books, the Rotarians raised funds and purchased new books from children’s book publishers. So far, the program has distributed more than 14,000 books in the community and has been so successful that Rotary Canada is considering adopting it as a national initiative.

There is also the “Rotary Initiated Child Enrichment,” or RICE, program, which was set up in Kingston in 2003, by which every Grade-One child in the city is provided with a library card: 4,000 cards have been given out so far. “Food for Thought,” another Rotary project, distributes books to families at local food banks.

All these programs can’t help but raise reading and comprehension skills in the Kingston area, and in the country at large. We cannot afford to be complacent about our level of literacy. True, a recent poll showed that in one week in January of this year, 2.7 million books were either purchased from bookstores or borrowed from public libraries: assuming that a similar number of books were acquired the previous week, we can guess that about 5 million people were reading a book that week. That’s one out of every seven Canadians. We can do better.

In the past year, out of every dollar spent by the federal government on arts funding in Canada, 47 cents went to broadcasting, and only 4 cents went to publishing. We can do better.

Why should we? Is having a higher literacy rate important? What tangible benefits derive from being a true nation of readers?

Statistics Canada reports that every 1-percent increase in the nation’s literacy rate translates into a 2.5 percent increase in our gross domestic product. In other words, every time 350,000 Canadians learn to read, our GDP goes up by $32 billion. That’s one incentive, but there are other, perhaps more important, considerations.

Currently, about one in three Canadians are not literate enough to understand the difference between opposing points of view in newspaper editorials. We are now in the midst of an election campaign. Living in a country in which 48 percent of the population have substandard literacy skills has serious implications for the future of participatory democracy.

Wayne Grady is a member of the National Reading Campaign’s steering committee. He lives north of Kingston.

Originally published in the Kingston Whig-Standard