HONG KONG SCHOOLS are being offered a magic key to help unlock the door to children's reading.
Instilling a love of reading is central to education reform, and last week schools were given help to implement the government's literacy policy from an unlikely source.
Forget international educators and curriculum experts: meet instead, a white middle-class nuclear family with three happy children and an eccentric dog.
Mum, dad, Kipper, twins Biff and Chip and Floppy the dog have been central characters in the Oxford Reading Tree (ORT), a British-based graded reading scheme, since its inception in 1988. For a whole week, independent literacy consultant Mary Langley toured schools at the request of Oxford University Press (OUP) to give seminars to teachers and parents on how the tree might help with a whole range of reading skills and strategies.
The series was the brainchild of Rod Hunt, who decided he could do a lot better than the dull books his son brought home from school and was reluctant to read. His aim was to create stories that engaged developing readers who would be motivated to learn to love to read.
The discovery of the magic key in the books that form the trunk of the tree is the hook to adventure and lively cross-curricular subject matter. It transports the children and the readers from their everyday lives to dramas back in time, in other cultures or even into space.