Reading Together® Community

If you are unfamiliar with Reading Together®, then you may wonder what the programme is, and why so many New Zealand teachers, schools leaders and librarians have implemented it since the early 1980s.

Reading Together® is best summarised as an effective, research-based family literacy programme. It develops collaborative and learning-centred relationships between schools, libraries, families and communities.

Research studies have shown that uninformed 'help' with reading, together with pressure at home, make things harder for the child, the parents and also for teachers and schools. Reading Together® helps parents to provide informed support for their children's reading at home. The workshop programme enables teachers, parents and librarians to support children's reading development much more effectively than any of them can do if they are working independently of – and often at odds with – each other.

In many ways, Reading Together® reflects the wisdom of a very old proverb which says 'It takes a whole village to raise a child'.