A staggering 2,000 primary school children are poised and ready to take part in the West Midlands biggest ever week-long reading challenge. The challenge, called One Million Minutes, is run by award-winning education charity Achievement for All, and is making its way around the country to encourage children to read, following research that reading for just ten minutes a day can have a huge impact on a child’s education.
The class which reads for the most amount of time during the week (Wednesday 11th November-Wednesday 18th November), will win a brand new reading corner packed full of exciting books for their school worth £1,000, courtesy of Peters Books & Furniture.
CEO and founder of Achievement for All, Professor Sonia Blandford, said:
"We are delighted that so many children are taking part in the West Midlands leg of the One Million Minutes reading challenge, a huge congratulations to all the schools which have registered.
“We developed One Million Minutes to highlight the importance of reading to parents and encourage children to pick up a book and really enjoy reading. A quarter of all children leave primary education without reading well and in England, struggling to read is more closely linked to low pay and the risk of being unemployed than in any other developed country.[1]
“We really want to turn this statistic around, and thanks to Peters Books & Furniture, we are able to offer a fantastic prize to the class who reads the most during this exciting week. However, we don’t want One Million Minutes to last just a week, we want to instil a lifelong passion for reading!”
Teachers can register as many classes as they wish, and once registered, they will be sent a welcome pack full of colourful posters, door hangers and lesson plans to help engage their class in the challenge.
Also included is a special bookmark which children can use to log their daily minutes read at home and at school. All teachers have to do is collate the class total at the end of every day and log it on the One Million Minutes website: https://millionminutes.afaeducation.org/
Each class can then see how well they are doing and race against other classes in their own school and 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 leaderboard at the end of the week, will be presented with the prize for the whole school to use.
Achievement for All is one of a coalition of charities leading the Read On. Get On. campaign to get every child reading well by the age of 11 by 2025.
