Jeanette Winterston--from The Times Online

It may be that we have been focusing too much on how to get kids to read, when just as urgently we need to get them to speak - confidently, fluently and, yes, poetically. Ted Hughes was a big believer in teaching children to memorise poetry, and to recite what they had memorised.

Any actor will tell you that the way to learn lines is to learn them out loud, and that the repetition of lines seems to explain their meaning. When we read out loud, or when we recite from memory, we have an audience, even if there is no one in the room. We start to convince or entertain an invisible other, and as we do so both the sense of the passage and our confidence in it increase. It doesn't matter even if we don't understand all the words. Booming out poetry helps kids no end, and is why we need them to grapple with Shakespeare, with Donne, with Dylan Thomas. The more unfamiliar the language the more spectacular the transformation from incomprehension to delight.

Reading silently, the acute pleasure of book and eye, is a sophisticated pleasure. Reading or reciting aloud is campfire stuff, good fun, muck in, and kids very soon lose their nerves and vie with one another in the high spirits natural to them. It may well be that, now we are breeding a solitary generation locked to computer screens, the best antidote is not a book and a bedroom, but learning a story and learning to tell it - learning a funny poem, refinding the out-of-fashion skills of rhetoric and challenge.

If I begin: “A King had three sons ...” what's the next line? It's a game I play with the kids, and it demands a certain stock in trade of stories known, some current imagination, and pleasure in words. I really believe that kids are language-monkeys and that with the slightest encouragement they find the words the so-called education experts believe are so stressful, impossible, absent.

Forget the five-hours-a-week culture routine. Kids need two languages and a musical instrument. The end.
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Amen and Selah. I so insist on students reading aloud and memorizing--in unison at times. This is one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned, and even though I'm not a great reader, I'm better than I used to be. Harvey is the among the best of readers, and I love to hear him read. I don't miss a chance to go to any reading--fiction, poetry, memoir, storytelling workshop. I want to hear.

I also agree with the "two languages" and the musical instrument. Studying piano for 10 years still enriches my life. I didn't play very well, but I learned what playing very well was supposed to sound like (not like the church pianist!), and I fell in love with Beethoven, Mozart, Grieg, and Saint-Saens (the only operas I'd know otherwise would be soap operas). Piano is the reason I type 200 WPM without ever taking a typing class. I transcribe the way a metronome beats. Music has supported me spiritually and financially for many, many years.