“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man,” says Sir Francis Bacon.
The benefits of reading are known to many and now, the Government of Andhra Pradesh has launched a programme ‘We love reading’ to inculcate a love for reading in students at school.
Launching the campaign in Guntur during a programme held to mark Constitution Day on Thursday, Minister for Human Resources Development Adimulapu Suresh said the concept of ‘We love reading’ is a barinchild of Chief Minister Y.S Jagan Mohan Reddy. It intends to inculcate the habit of reading among students at an early age.
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‘We love reading’, the one year reading fluency campaign takes place in four phases -- preparatory, foundation, advanced and valedictory to improve the reading skills of children from classes 3 to 9, he said.
Home Minister Mekathoti Sucharita urged students to make reading of books, newspapers on a day to day basis a habit to gain knowledge and build their own personality. She said the government prioritised the education sector and implemented various schemes like Amma Vodi, Vidya Kanuka, Vasati Deevena, and Vidya Deevena which have greatly increased enrolment in government schools.
Principal Secretary (school education) B. Rajasekhar, District Collector I. Samuel Ananda Kumar, Joint Collectors A.S Dinesh Kumar and P. Prasanthi and other officials were present.
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The campaign aims at transforming non-readers into readers by cultivating the habit of reading and focuses on developing foundational literacy skills both conceptual and skill-based knowledge among the students of Class 3 to 9 and intends to build advanced skills after the foundation. The advanced skills include phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, reading fluency, vocabulary among others. Awareness will be created on using e-books and digital libraries wherever infrastructure is available.
Main activities
The main activities to be taken up in this campaign are classroom reading, school book bank, community reading centre, reading fests and most importantly providing two library periods, one is for Telugu reading and the other is for English. As part of classroom reading, a reading corner with all the available library books and reading cards will be made available in each classroom. Similarly with school book banks, where books of all kinds will be collected from teachers, students and even donors, for reading.
The programme also has a community reading volunteer where the headmaster and teachers with the help of ward volunteers and village secretariat staff have to identify volunteers who can contribute their time for school students reading campaign during after school hours and holidays to run the community reading centre. In addition to these, monthly reading fests will be conducted at the village or school level to perform reading skills by the students and to assess the achievement of learning outcome of students.
So far, about 45,359 schools registered under the Readers Clubs and 72% of these schools have libraries. The existing school libraries and available village libraries will be strengthened and utilised for this initiative.