ABSTRACT
This book is about reading. Its aim is to help you, as a teaching assistant, to support children in becoming readers. But what does it mean to become a reader? We would argue that being a reader’ is different from being someone who ‘knows how to read’. Of course, if you are a reader you do know how to read, but we probably all know people who know how to read but do so as little as possible. They have a very limited view of what reading has to offer them to enrich their lives. There are lots of reasons why they have got into this state and among these sadly we must sometimes include poor teaching in the primary school. We would like to examine more closely what it is a reader knows and does because we would surely all agree that our aim is to send children off at the end of their primary years not only skilled and confident readers but above all, as Margaret Meek once said, ‘knowing what reading is good for’.
