Sir Michael Marmot’s health report identified literacy as one of the top things that we can do for our community’s health!
This is about reading to our little children every day. The importance of getting all our children reading well and writing cannot be overemphasized.
I did a search for links to programs to teach children to spell. I was looking for an excellent one that I went to a workshop on (4S Spelling) but couldn’t find it. Here is another though: http://www.macroworks.com.au/
We just have to make sure that none of our children fall through the reading writing spelling cracks.
It is about the methods used to teach our children to read and write in schools. Some methods have proven highly ineffective but still get practiced. They have staying power because they got taught in our teacher education programs in universities for some decades so all the new teachers learned them and it carries on. Takes a long time to fix once a wrong idea takes hold unfortunately.
We should be able to expect virtually all of our children to be able to learn to read and write competently. Anything less is failed teaching methods.
There are volunteer reading support programs operating in some of our local schools. Community members parents and retired people can get involved and be part of helping our children learn to become good readers.
How many adults in our community aren’t very confident reading and writing? What adult literacy opportunities are there available to remedy this? Poor literacy is very common in areas of poor outcomes such as prison. We want a literate community not for some of our community to have disfunctional lives.
Finding out that being able to read is one of the top health recommendations out of the UK study left me wondering exactly why. Is it that being able to read is a core skill for all the other things that make life in today’s world work? Not easy to keep healthy if you are stressed about your life falling apart and getting into messes?
Reading is part of being in control of our lives and being in control of our lives is important for health.
Another aspect today is health literacy. There is so much excellent health information ‘out there’ on the web and increasingly we can access quality information to help keep ourselves well. But we need to be able to read to access and understand it. We now have access from our internet connections to top quality databases of medical research reports and best practice reviews if we want and are able to read it. This is a fantastic resource.
Even a local storehouse of health information such as this one that we have been collecting on the Transition The Grove Health Forum has a wealth of information in it. Much of it is collected from top health and research sources and trimmed down to the core message. The biggest challenge is reading it and putting it into practice in our lives and our community. There is more than enough wisdom in what is already collected to make a massive difference to our health if we put it into practice.