Articles about reading

Top tips for World Book Day

Feb 2023

2023 marks the UK and Ireland’s 28th World Book Day! World Book Day is a global charity on a mission to encourage children to read for pleasure, by providing them with the opportunity to have a book of their own. At Kumon, we aim to foster a love of reading and learning in every child. This is why we love to celebrate World Book Day!

At Kumon, we have marked the occasion every year through a broad range of activities and there's no better place to get inspiration than the World Book Day website. Here are some of our favourites. 

1. Enter a competition  - Let your child's imagination go wild and participate in one of the official World Book Day competitions. They're asking; "In the How to Train Your Dragon books, our hero Hiccup has great adventures with a brilliant little dragon named Toothless. If you had your own dragon to train, what would you call it?"  Author of the books, Cressida Cowell who is the former children's laureate gives some excellent tips about helping children choose and talk about books. 

You can also check out their competition page here. There's the design National Book Token competition, one lucky reader can win a bundle of signed books by Waterstones Children’s Laureate, Joseph Coelho or be in with a chance to win a Jamie Smart book bundle, amongst many more ways to win! 

2. World of Stories audiobooks. -  Audiobooks are a brilliant way of enjoying stories, whether you’re reading together with the family, or listening in your own time, find your child's next audiobook to tune into here.

3. Check out all the free resources -  Download and create your own personal reading chart or My Book Map here to encourage a reading habit and incentives to keep reading. If you fancy a colouring party, there's a celebration pack to download here. Download a new bookmark, here or book jacket, here or even your own book, here

If you need some inspiration to find a story, you can take a look at Kumon’s Recommended Reading List, which presents 380 books intended to help Kumon students find books that they will enjoy reading, and to encourage them to read books from a wide range of genres and styles. Why not find books you can read together as a family? Reading to children for 10 minutes every day can make a real difference in their learning and help to develop their interest in reading.

Perhaps this is the perfect time to consider enrolling your child into the Kumon English Programme. Our English programme helps students develop their vocabulary, and grammatical precision, and improve their memorisation skills. The programme introduces students to different genres of text; familiarising students with both fiction and non-fiction, expanding their knowledge of the world and introducing them to new areas of interest. Our Instructors support students to be able to read thoroughly, extract key information from the content and express an opinion on what they have read in a compelling way.

The Kumon English Programme is not tied to any curriculum but complements learning across all subjects at school, giving students the freedom to become advanced, independent and enthusiastic learners, as well as thoughtful individuals.