A celebration of reading | Mrs Louise Underwood

Terrace Book Week – A celebration of the joy of reading

Every day of the school year, the Terrace Library staff promote reading, but in Week 4 of Term 2, the Terrace Family comes together to celebrate the joy of reading during Terrace Book Week.

Across Book Week, we hear from guest authors and conduct various activities and competitions, the highlight being the Get Caught Reading competition. This competition has proven so popular that our Old Boys now have their own division, and entries are rolling in! Our students love viewing the images, and we enjoy awarding prizes for the most interesting and thought provoking photos.

We promote and celebrate reading for a variety of reasons. Reading reduces stress and has a positive impact on mental and emotional health. Reading also serves three main purposes; we read to access information, to undertake a task and for a literary experience.

In the Terrace Library, we read for all the above reasons. Still, when we read for a literary experience, we explore the human condition through the interaction of characters, the depiction of events, and an exploration of emotions. Readers experience events vicariously as the text stimulates sense, feeling, imagination and thinking.

Research also reveals that reading has cognitive consequences, which are longitudinal, accumulative, and exponential. Positive reading experiences can enrich vocabulary development and increase general knowledge, comprehension, spelling, verbal fluency and intelligence.

We promote and celebrate reading with our students so they can grow personally in understanding more about themselves, others and society. Reading can potentially transform them into becoming lifelong learners for their ongoing personal and academic growth. It also has the power to accelerate students to their next level of achievement. Active reading, a metacognitive strategy, is taught in library reading lessons to enable this growth in student reader identity.

In the Terrace Library, we remind the boys that Terracians are readers and successful Terracians are good readers. Good readers practice the habit of reading daily, and they think as they read. We hope you, too, will embrace the joy of reading with your sons and the Terrace Family.