Dear Parent/Carer
The 2014 football World Cup is nearly here. A chance for us all to enjoy some football, but also for us to encourage football-loving children to read about the game. From blogs to biographies, websites to fiction, newspapers to magazines – reading about the World Cup can help your children to enjoy reading for pleasure.
The National Literacy Trust and children’s author, Tom Palmer, have devised nine top tips to help you do just that during June and July.
- Deliver a World Cup preview from a newspaper to your child’s bedroom on Saturday or Sunday morning to get them reading before the big kick off.
- Choose a football story from a library or bookshop and read it aloud together every night during the tournament.
- Play World Cup Book Bingo with your children during some of the big matches. Download the bingo cards from www.wordsforlife.org.uk.
- Discover some of the superb football fiction that World Cup Book Bingo features. Most of the featured books are available in our public libraries and bookshops.
- Buy them a copy of one of the popular football magazines: Match, Kick or Match of the Day. Or FourFourTwo for older children.
- Enjoy a World Cup fantasy football game in one of the newspapers, which means you will all need to keep a close eye on who is injured and who has been dropped from teams. Another reason to read football newspapers and websites together.
- Borrow one of the many guides to playing football from your local library if your children are inspired by the skills of Messi and Ronaldo. The Usbourne Soccer School is particularly good, as is Know the Game: Football.
- Set your home page on your computer to a decent football website like www.bbc.co.uk/worldcup.
- Find one of the child-friendly autobiographies of footballers, full of statistics, pictures and clean stories. Ask at the library, school or a bookshop for advice, or look at reviews from parents online.
We hope these World Cup reading tips help you and your family read even more for pleasure this summer. Happy reading!