Award-winning education charity Achievement for All has teamed up with Peters Books & Furniture to launch the One Million Minutes reading challenge across the West Midlands, with one triumphant class winning a brand new reading corner for their school worth over £1,000. Primary school classes are being asked to read for as many minutes as they can in just one week, between Wednesday 11th November – Wednesday 18th November 2015.
They will be given special bookmarks to log their reading minutes at home and at school. All the teachers have to do is collate the class total each day and log it on the Million Minutes website.
Each class can see how well they are doing and race against other classes in their own school or schools across the West Midlands on the specially designed leader board known as the “Readometer”.
The class that reads for the longest, and tops the leader board at the end of the week, will win over a £1,000 of new furniture and books for their school.
"I've never seen anything like it - children we can't normally get interested in reading are spending break-time with their heads buried in books!"
Chieveley Primary School, Newbury, Berkshire
Research shows just ten minutes of extra reading a day can have a huge impact on a child's education. Recent statistics show a quarter of all children leave primary education without reading well. In England, struggling to read is more closely linked to low pay and the risk of being unemployed than in any other developed country.
CEO and founder of Achievement for All, Professor Sonia Blandford, said:
“Just ten minutes of reading a day can make such a difference to a child, that’s really the minimum we as parents should be striving for. But we hope this challenge is going to see children doing far more than that. We hope all primary school teachers will sign their class up to the challenge, and celebrate literacy and a love of reading by making One Million Minutes part of their school day.”
One Million Minutes is a national challenge rolling out region by region over the next 12 months. Over 4,000 children took part in the Berkshire challenge in May, where the total number of minutes logged was over 831,000! Can classes across the West Midlands beat them and hit that elusive One Million mark?