(4 minute read)

We asked Adam Samuel, a class teacher at Abbott Alphege Academy, about ‘reading for pleasure’ and how our game, Teach Your Monster Reading for Fun, connects the worlds of reading for pleasure and technology. 

Who are you and what do you do? 

My name is Adam Samuel. I am a class teacher at Abbot Alphege Academy.I currently teach a year three-four class.

I'm a jack of all trades in school. The beautiful thing about being a primary school teacher is that you do a bit of everything. So I'm also the computing subject lead and modern foreign language lead. So I'm not the reading lead, but I am passionate about reading.

That's the nice thing about being a primary school teacher is you get to share a love and a passion for multiple things with the children, rather than just one. 

How important do you feel reading for pleasure is for kids? 

So important! It's a way of creating new worlds and new experiences. A lot of children can get overwhelmed with the world and with life. Reading a book, having the opportunity to lose yourself in someone else’s creation or world, whether it be Julia Donaldson, Rachel Bright or Jim Field, is an escape. Children need to be given the opportunity to escape into these worlds to have a broader appreciation for life in general, and it develops a love and passion for books.

What struggles do the kids in your class experience in reading for pleasure? 

Access to books. We have a nice library at school, and we have a local library, but one of the biggest struggles is maintaining that at home. We don't know what they (the kids) have at home and what their access is like at home. 

Ensuring they have access to a wide range of books is another struggle. Showing them how to engage with books and maintaining that engagement as well. It's quite easy for some children to get hooked on one genre, which is great, but also allows them an opportunity to broaden that reading passion.

Why can it be hard to instil a love of reading in young children? 

I think with young children, we're constantly battling the modern world. Technology is always offering new and exciting things for children to be doing, whether it's a new game to play or a new media platform to engage with. Picking up a book is probably the least of their interests. So I think it's important for us to find new ways of ensuring that children maintain their love and interest in reading.

Can you tell us about your experience with Teach Your Monster Reading for Fun? 

Teach Your Monster Reading for Fun is absolutely fantastic in ensuring that children maintain a passion for reading and are exposed to a wide range of texts. It's engaging. It's fun. And it crosses two worlds. It crosses the world of technology with the world of books. Today, it’s really important that we bring those two together. Otherwise, we'll just have kids lost in games, without developing essential skills, such as reading.

How does the game help you as a teacher with reading for pleasure?

Reading for Fun helps as a teacher because it gives children an engaging way of accessing books that's different to just going into the library or a bookshop. It's quite easy to get lost and overwhelmed by too many books. And what's nice with Reading for Fun is that it's a smaller number of books that they can engage with over whatever time frame they want. They get to do little jobs and little activities within the game that allow them to do more than just reading. So they are reading without necessarily always knowing that they're reading, so it's multifaceted, which is great.

The other nice thing about Reading for Fun is the fact that they earn the books incrementally, and they get to earn them as rewards and collect them in a library. So when they go into their home, you can see the books piling up on their bookshelves, just like they might at home. They can go into their bookshelf and select the book they want to read that they've earned as a reward for these jobs, which is really nice. 

Do you have any special tips for other teachers on how to integrate it into their classroom practice? 

My tip for other teachers is to download Teach Your Monster Reading for Fun, give the children some logins, and see how much they engage with and have fun with it. It will change your day.

Also download the login details for each child, stick it in the front of their read and record books. Send it home so that they can engage with it at home as well as at school.


Do you recommend that parents use the game at home, and if so, how? 

I would. It's a great way of engaging your children to read and exposing them to a wide range of books. It's also really handy if you want to distract your children with a book in the car on a long journey. Or maybe you're going away on holiday and you want the children to be quiet for a little bit, and it's a nice way of engaging them and keeping them occupied while you're out and about. 

It doesn't need to be used for long. Even just 10 to 20 minutes a day could be the difference between a child who is engaged with reading and a child who's not, and the child who's passionate for reading and a child who's not.

This article was just a snippet of our larger case study interview, which you can read here.