I've got three kids, two girls and a boy. With the girls I never had to think about reading, hand them a book and that was them gone for an hour. My son is nine and it's always been a battle. Not that he can't read, he just never wanted to. Every night it was "five more minutes" or "one more page" and I'd basically be dragging it out of him.
Then a few weeks ago he came home from school properly buzzing to tell me about a book he was reading. I actually thought something else had happened at school, that's how unusual it was.
Turns out his class have started using something called Everybody Reads. The first thing he showed me wasn't even the story, it was the character he'd made. He'd built himself as an avatar and put himself right into the book as the main character.
He's done about five different versions of that same story now and reads them out at dinner like he's commentating.
He's obsessed with football, always has been, so of course that's all he wants to read now. Some of it's factual, stuff about his favourite players and clubs. Some of it he's written where he's playing for Arsenal in the Champions League final scoring the winner, obviously.
I think there's loads of other stuff on there too but he's found his thing and I'm not going to be the one arguing with that. I honestly don't care anymore if it's fact or fiction or him lifting a trophy that hasn't happened, if he's reading without being asked I'm happy.
I know a lot of people are wary of AI, especially with kids, and I get why. But this is the first time I've actually seen it used in a way that felt like a genuinely good thing. It hasn't replaced anything, it's just found the one thing that got him wanting to read on his own, and after years of nagging I honestly wasn't expecting that.
See it in your own classroom
Schools across the UK and internationally are using Everybody Reads to turn reluctant readers into confident ones.
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