The children enjoy a wonderful World Book Day……..

Today, RSM was invaded by an amazing army of fictional characters from Angelina Ballerina to Willy Wonka and the Big Friendly Giant, as we celebrated World Book Day. During a special assembly, the Year 6 Librarians and Reading Leaders entertained the school with funny poems and playing their own version of Top Trumps. They also announced the winners of the Book Mark Competition

Every child will come home with a book mark plus £1 book token. To find out which books the children can buy with just the one token, why not visit the site at: World Book Day

Thank you to all the children and staff for dressing up, and for all the parents for taking the trouble to organise the fancy dress.

The benefits of reading for pleasure

Reading because we love to read is wonderful, for its own sake, but reading for pleasure has other proven benefits.   There is strong evidence that reading for pleasure is linked to improved academic performance, but it goes further than this.   Reading for pleasure can result in increased empathy, improved relationships with others, reductions in the symptoms of depression and dementia and improved wellbeing. How lovely that something so enjoyable is also good for us!

Unfortunately, not everyone in the world is as lucky as we are.

Unesco Statistics on Literacy

• Today, nearly 17% of the world’s adult population is still not literate; two thirds of them women, making gender equality even harder to achieve.
• The scale of illiteracy among youth also represents an enormous challenge; an estimated 122 million youth globally are illiterate, of which young women represent 60.7%.
• The 67.4 million children who are out of school are likely to encounter great difficulties in the future, as deficient or non-existent basic education is the root cause of illiteracy.
• With some 775 million adults lacking minimum literacy skills, literacy for all thus remains elusive.

Don’t forget to look at our gallery of photographs here