Children are rightly super delighted to be on holiday and forgetting all about school. Pity most end up attending summer school, which despite all good intentions and dedication is the response to a national demand for morning baby-sitting. I would not like to shoot them down completely, but I have strong reservations about children walking into a school building – no matter how welcoming – during the holidays. I believe children on holiday should not even walk within a shadow of a classroom.

Now the very mention of a classroom (it’s summer, I know) brings to mind a report published last year by the Centre for Education Economics in the UK.

It categorically stated that fun lessons facilitating children’s learning is a myth. Such a startling statement must have blown away educators’ eyebrows, not merely raised them, because it slams 60 years of honing child-centred learning which lies at the core of modern teaching techniques.

Rather than arguing a case of for or against, I would like to share what this report made me think of, precisely the role of reading, which is pivotal irrespective of teaching philosophies. Crucial aspects like children’s emotional stability, their different learning paces and different aptitudes as well as a wide range of cognitive problems must also be factored in. Yet space constraints compel me to focus on learning different reading methods without going into these considerations. I must also add that the necessity of good reading skills continues in everyday life long after school life is over.

Maltese students are scoring increasingly poor marks in reading tasks. The once clear divide between avid, average and reluctant readers is blurring. Ad­mittedly, we live in a cyber world where almost everything in print is regarded as a fossil only fit for a museum – and dropping by them is not high on most Maltese families’ radar.

Meanwhile, alarm bells over increasing illiteracy are getting louder and louder. Since the power of images is beating that of words, a strong resemblance in this regard between today’s world and the medieval epoch cannot be missed. Sadly, this is a global trend. Technological realities apart, we have never been a reading nation. How many parents at home get down to reading for pleasure which will automatically give their kids a good example to emulate? I must also be missing something for I am baffled at how reading has become a chore or an academic exercise to improve word bank, syntax, spelling and glean new ideas. Nor am I sure whether this is a solely local phenomenon.

When I was a schoolgirl, my idea of reading was (still is) getting into a world of wanting to find out what happens next. Vocabulary, sentence structure… the works were never given a thought, though assimilated subliminally. Reading eventually became fundamental to my studying, even though I never gave up reading for pleasure. Having spent over two de­cades teaching textual analysis, I must admit my bias for narratives that get my critical juices going, which does not mean that I do not enjoy the odd beach read.

Effective reading helps to beat frustration and negative attitudes toward school

Teachers naturally harp on the importance of reading while guiding students to get to grips with a variety of reading methods. Yet parents can be far more influential. Here are a few tips to try out all the year round, but more especially in summer when kids are not bogged down with tonnes of homework after a long day at school.

Imagination and discovery

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover!’ – yet first impressions do count a great deal. Ask your children what they think of the title and design; more so after reading the blurb. Prod them on to imagine how the story will evolve, and if hooked, let them read it at their own pace. Encourage them to look up the author’s profile on the internet. Seeing what authors look like and getting to know a little about their lives helps children realise that writers are people too. Most of them have remarkable life experiences which offer further fodder for discussion.

It is also vital to spur on children to discover what genre they prefer, and occasionally float the idea of them flipping through something they normally would not bother with; without ever pushing too much. If they are grappling with a poem, ask them to home in on the title first to figure out what it implies and what to expect. Once read, does the poem deliver on its title’s expectations?

The same goes for a novel. Title choice is never haphazard so that by keeping it in mind, children will glean a synthetic approach to a text. Learning to see links in the bigger picture is another valuable life skill.

Should they be reading traditional or e-books? I honestly feel there is no point in quibbling, for reading is reading, though psychologists are digging into the differences.

What follows is more relevant to term time than summertime but is still part of helping children read. We often need to read something twice before it is completely understood, so we cannot expect children to be wizards. This leads to reinforcing the use of skim and scan reading – necessary when delving into comprehension tasks or textbooks.

Skim reading enables a quick run through a text to get the gist. It is effective in a text that includes sub-headings, bold/highlighted text, sidebars or any other presentational aid. It is also the way to get an instant ‘feel’ of the text which doubles up as good time-management practice.

Scan reading is much slower paced and enables assimilation, reflection as well as an in-depth response. Goad your kids on to underline unfamiliar words and have them look up their meaning in context. Here, highlighters, pencils as well as sticky notes make great reading companions. Therefore, encourage children to keep them handy. Taking down the main points should not only be geared towards summaries but more especially done as a studying and recap exercise. (Sometimes, textbooks include the main points at the end of each chapter.) Incidentally, note-taking can be in the form of a list, diagram or table. Help your kids discover what works best for them while pointing out that the trick is for the notes to be kept as brief as possible.

Experimenting with both types of reading shows a child which one to opt for and when. Skim reading is ideal to quickly locate a key point in an instruction guide or the answer to a comprehension question by retrieving the key word/words (or their equivalent) originally set in the question. In contrast, scan reading is crucial to underline important points/quotations as well as pick out detail. In later life this comes in particularly useful where contracts or sales agreements are involved.

Effective reading helps to beat frustration and negative attitudes toward school. Engaging with a text also creates opportunities to question, infer, synthesise and come up with alternatives and possible solutions – in other words, how to learn rather than what to learn. By extension that means how to think, not what to think.