Anantapur: 'We love reading' catches up among govt school kids

Anantapur: The concept of 'We love reading' aimed at improving reading skills among the students right from the primary level, a brainchild of Chief Minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, is catching up with government school students. The campaign intends to inculcate the habit of reading among students at an early age.

'We love reading', the one year reading fluency campaign takes place in four phases — preparatory, foundation, advanced and valedictory — to improve the reading skills of children from Classes 3 to 9. Presently, the reading campaign is being implemented only among high school students of Class 8 to 10.

Schemes like Amma Vodi, Vidya Kanuka, Vasati Deevena, and Vidya Deevena have greatly increased enrolment in government schools. According to district education officer Kagithapu Samuel, a study revealed that even high school students are unable to read their lessons fluently either in Telugu or English due to poor reading habits.

So one hour library class is implemented every day, designed to inculcate reading habits by sending them to nearby government libraries and also to their own school libraries. Students will be free to read story books of their choice and not necessarily their school lessons. This is triggering interest in reading and transforming the child into a good reader, he maintained.

There are 128 libraries in the district run by district library department to which the students will have access. Besides, school libraries are also being developed so that they will have accessibility to reading right in their school compounds. District collector Gandham Chandrudu is taking keen interest in the success of the movement among the students by monitoring the programme personally.

The main activities to be taken up in this campaign are classroom reading, school book bank, community reading centre, reading fests and most importantly, providing two library periods, one is for Telugu reading and the other for English.

As part of classroom reading, a reading corner with all the available library books and reading cards will be made available in each classroom. Similarly, with school book banks, books of all kinds will be collected from teachers, students and even donors, for reading.

The programme also has a community reading volunteer where the headmaster and teachers with the help of ward volunteers and village secretariat staff have to identify volunteers who can contribute their time for school students' reading campaign during and after school hours and holidays to run the community reading centre.

In addition to these, monthly reading fests will be conducted at the village or school level to perform reading skills by the students and to assess the achievement of learning outcome of students.

So far, 45,359 schools registered under the Readers Clubs and 72 per cent of these schools have libraries. The existing school libraries and available village libraries will be strengthened and utilised for this initiative.