Stephanie Strange – Community Participation Worker, Culture Leicestershire, Leicestershire County Council
During my first week working for a service that promoted Reading for Pleasure to children in care, I remember my colleague telling me about the OECD research* which evidenced Reading for Pleasure having such an impact on life chances. Researchers found that it is more important to be engaged in reading and from a less privileged social background than to be privileged but disengaged. I had seen the impact of Reading for Pleasure both in my personal life and from the tiny, seemingly trivial yet meaningful and important interactions that happen every day at my job in a library service. Despite this, I had never really understood just how much of a gift we are giving children when presenting them with the opportunity to develop a love of stories and books, especially for our children in care who have had a challenging start to life.
A significant part of my role was sharing stories with children in a school setting, mostly one-to-one, to provide an opportunity to gain back those foundational building blocks that they had likely missed out on in early childhood. This could be the subtle learning that takes place when sharing stories; one child I worked with was horrified that, although her milk was bought from Tesco (as she confidently stated!), it originated from a cow. Another child didn’t know that chickens lay eggs. With this very basic information that most toddlers would know, but that many children in care will not have been taught, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that literacy is a struggle among children in care.
In addition to this learning and language development barrier that children in care frequently face, we often have higher levels of special education needs, not least of which are the emotional barriers that affect the ability of children to concentrate. The social element that is inherent and intuitive when sharing a story was, therefore, perhaps even more important when working with this cohort of children. Developing an emotional connection, being engaged in a book together, mutually laughing at the funny bits, and jointly figuring out what may happen next; the mere act of sitting closely together in a safe environment helped in developing healthy co-regulation among the children we read to, which in turn helped them to manage their own emotions and attention.
One of the main challenges whilst working with children in care was their attention span. Many children were simply not able to concentrate for the five minutes it takes to read a picture book. This may have been because they hadn’t been read to before, and therefore did not know the joy that can be found in a book, or it may be because they were hypervigilant, constantly on guard and on edge, or perhaps because they hadn’t been given the tools to self-regulate and manage their emotions and behaviours. Sometimes, it was a combination of all these reasons and more.
My biggest success story is perhaps a six-year-old girl named Bailey. For the first few weeks, Bailey would pick three or four books out of my bag and be hugely enthused about them but would also be completely unable to listen to a whole story. She would only manage one or two pages before jumping out of her chair and roaming the room. I could see how hard Bailey was trying, how much she wanted to please, and how fascinated she was by the whole concept of simply being read to. Despite this, she was always hyperaware of her surroundings, and I could see that she was in a state of barely contained panic all of the time. Although Bailey wanted to stay longer, I kept these first few sessions very short at only 10 minutes or so in order to celebrate the small wins such as maintaining concentration for a few pages, or focusing on the story well enough to make a prediction about what a character might do next. Over time, Bailey and I built a trusting and reliable relationship. We worked hard together and over the weeks and months, she slowly settled down and started to build up her attention span. As our relationship strengthened, she began to co-regulate, using the support of my calm demeanour as a means of managing her anxiety and relieving her tension. We started to finish whole picture books, and then we would finish two or three, and then more, without Bailey moving more than an excited wiggle in her seat.
By the time I finished working with Bailey, she was 8 years old and able to self-regulate her emotions and behaviours to the point where she was thriving at school and, sometimes, opting to read to me during our sessions Our sessions started to overrun because I couldn’t resist her pleas of, “Just one more, Steph,” and teachers would often have to come and find her. The last time I saw Bailey was at a summer scheme when she was 11 years old. When the group leader asked any book-related questions to the group, Bailey’s hand was always first in the air. Not only did she speak eloquently about the books she was reading, but she was also winning prizes for a sports activity that required huge amounts of sustained concentration. I know that Reading for Pleasure made an immeasurable impact on that child’s life.
I can safely say that all the children that we worked with have benefited in some large or small way. For some, it was a period of calm and fun in a potentially overwhelming school day. Older children often relished the opportunity to safely regress to the Picture Books and Interactive Lift-the-flap Books that they had missed out on in their younger years. Others used the opportunity to listen to stories that their peers were reading that they would not have been able to access on their own. Some explored something new every week while others demanded the same books for months. Occasionally, teachers would provide some information regarding a child’s social struggles. In these situations, picture books would offer a wide range of social and emotional concepts that could be talked about in a safe way. When we talked about characters in a story, children were free to make connections to their real lives in their own time, rather than feeling attacked and automatically defensive if their behaviour was discussed directly with the whole class.
Reading for Pleasure doesn’t always need to have a Bailey-sized, life-changing impact. The small moments of escape, peace, humour, and shared experience were just as important to every child I worked with. These are some of the gifts we can give to the children in our lives through Reading for Pleasure.
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* OECD (2002) Reading For Change Performance And Engagement Across Countries - Results From PISA 2000