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Developing Reading for Pleasure: engaging young readers
Developing Reading for Pleasure: engaging young readers

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

Developing Reading for Pleasure: engaging young readers

Introduction and guidance

This free badged course, Developing Reading for Pleasure: engaging young readers, lasts 24 hours, with 8 ‘sessions’. You can work through the course at your own pace, so if you have more time one week there is no problem with pushing on to complete a further study session. The eight sessions are linked to ensure a logical flow through the course. They are:

  1. The importance of childhood reading
  2. Being a reader
  3. The power of narrative
  4. Knowing your texts, knowing your readers
  5. Reading for Pleasure pedagogy
  6. Building reading communities in school
  7. Supporting children as readers at home
  8. Enticing reluctant readers and addressing challenges.
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Learning journal

Throughout the course you will be prompted to engage with learning activities and reflect on your own reading and teaching practices. It will be helpful to keep a learning journal where you can record your responses; this can be a notebook, or you can download the course learning journal. Please note, only you can see what you write here; OpenLearn and the course team will not have access. The learning journal will become an invaluable resource for shaping your reading curriculum and it will help you communicate the rationale for your Reading for Pleasure practices to parents, colleagues, school leaders and school inspectors.

Now would be a good time to download and save the learning journal [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , so you have it ready for when you begin Session 1.

Alternative formats

Developing Reading for Pleasure: engaging young readers is available in a range of alternative formats, including Word, PDF and ePub, so you can download the course and study offline if you prefer.

Please note though that interactive elements of the course such as videos are not available in these formats. Also, in order to gain your badge and your Statement of Participation you will need to complete the online version of the course. More details on how to gain your badge can be found in the following sections.

You can find the alternative formats in the ‘Download this course’ box at the side or bottom of each page.

Learning outcomes:

After completing this course, you should be able to:

  • understand how reading changes children’s life chances
  • recognise the relationship between reading for pleasure and reading attainment
  • describe the social and emotional benefits of being a keen reader
  • identify challenges and barriers to fostering readers, and how to overcome them
  • apply research that demonstrates ways to establish a life-long love of reading.

Moving around the course

In the ‘Summary’ at the end of each session, you will find a link to the next session. If at any time you want to return to the start of the course, click on ‘Full course description’. From here you can navigate to any part of the course.

It’s also good practice, if you access a link from within a course page (including links to the quizzes), to open it in a new window or tab. That way you can easily return to where you’ve come from without having to use the back button on your browser.

The Open University would really appreciate a few minutes of your time to tell us about yourself and your expectations for the course before you begin, in our optional start-of-course survey. Participation will be completely confidential and we will not pass on your details to others.