For the Love of Reading - How Reading Fairy Early Learning Classes Started

For the Love of Reading - How Reading Fairy Early Learning Classes Started

Emily Guille-Marrett has over 20 years experience in educational and children's publishing, Ed Tech and writing. She launched Reading Fairy in 2014.

Prior to Reading Fairy, Emily published books and digital content to help children learn to read for international publishing houses, has commissioned writers such as Julia Donaldson (author of The Gruffalo) and has managed favourite character brands including Biff, Chip & Kipper and Topsy & Tim.

We spoke to Emily about the origins of the Reading Fairy programme and why supporting children with early reading is more important than ever.

What inspired your original idea to create early reading classes for children?

When my eldest son was a baby I took him to lots of wonderful baby, then later toddler and preschool classes. There were all sorts of brilliant things you could attend, like sensory classes, swimming classes, music and playgroup sessions. While these were all about giving children the best start, I couldn't see anything that was about reading.

Having been in children’s and educational publishing, my friends would ask me for advice around early reading, such as “When should I start reading with my child?” Or “Can you recommend books for me to read to my children?”. That’s when I thought I'm going to create a programme that is going to be really engaging and really fun that brings the joy of stories, books and reading to children. I also wanted it to help people to understand that you can start reading to your baby right from the moment that you're pregnant, that you can talk to your baby, you can sing nursery rhymes, you can play games. You can do all these wonderful things and actually, you can give an amazing foundation for both learning to read and creating a joy and a love of reading. We know both of those things have huge impacts on children's later academic success, but also their well-being and general love of creativity and imagination.

I was really lucky to get early startup support from Kent County Council, commissions from Kent Libraries and BookTrust as well as continued support from publishers, authors, illustrators and many more. Then I met the Baby Sensory team who had the vision to see how a partnership could help the programme thrive together, allowing Reading Fairy classes to become what they are today.

How did you start to develop the class curriculum?

I wanted to do a very gentle approach and to acknowledge the different stages that take place between being a baby and starting school. So we've got Book Babies for early sensory storytelling, we've got Toddler Tales for when you're just transitioning to speaking, developing vocabulary and singing nursery rhymes together and then we move on to Story Stars and finally Reading Recruits .

I knew from working in children's publishing that children absolutely love characters, characters are what motivate children in every TV show and film, so I wanted a character approach. Each of the characters that I was going to create would engage the child and they would become friends with these characters through the life of the programme. Also, each of the characters would represent a part of reading, because some people think phonics is really important (and it is!), but they don't realise that phonics on its own isn’t enough, or they may forget the importance of early talking and building a rich vocabulary or they may not realise that the songs that they're singing in the nursery rhymes actually have a real part to play in children’s reading development, for example they contains characters and short narrative structure.

So our five characters are Reading Fairy for storytelling, Music Mouse for music and rhyme, Chat Cat is introduced when children are starting to chat and Phonic Fox represents the letters and sounds in words and early reading. We’re not hot housing with that, it’s very gentle and starts with initial sounds for example “a cow says moo”, leading later to identify the cow to the sound, then eventually to know that C is for “cow”.
Finally, we've got Book Bear who is critical because every child sits in a circle and has an experience of an early book. We try really hard in Reading Fairy to give a range of books, a diversity of characters and stories from the traditional and classic to more contemporary fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

Reading Fairy classes have been running for over a decade, what have you learned about their impact during that time?

I'm constantly amazed by the power of Reading Fairy in all its locations across the country, but most importantly the incredible way that our Reading Fairy franchisees and class leaders take on the programme. In each of the locations I hear and see videos and get feedback of just how much children love the classes.
In terms of impact I just can't believe how many children have been on a journey either with me personally or through Reading Fairy class leaders and have this lovely foundation for going to school.

I have heard from some Reception teachers that in certain locations where there is Reading Fairy they can really tell children's familiarity with gentle routines. They’ve got good book behaviours, they're confident in their choices, they’ve got enough of an early foundation in phonics that it's actually bringing something useful to the class. It’s really important to say that as a founder l've worked on a number of the phonics programmes that children start in school and we are very sensitive to make sure we complement those phonics programmes rather than contradict them.

What's the best bit of feedback you have ever received from a parent or carer?

I've had many lovely bits of feedback about Reading Fairy over the years. I know this question is about the parents and carers, but in my hometown I still love it when kids who are now over 10 years old still refer to me as Reading Fairy from when they were really little and doing the programme with me. There's a real joy to that because they enjoyed coming to the classes and they knew me for a big chunk of those early years in their lives.

I'm very grateful and thankful for everyone who has told me about how much their children have enjoyed their classes, but one of the things that was really special for me was a father who came to the class and said he wasn't really read to as a child and he hadn't really experienced nursery rhymes or anything like that so wasn't sure about how approach these things with his own children.
What was incredibly joyful is he told me that in the Reading Fairy classes he was able to enjoy reading, he didn't feel awkward and he was happy to join in the nursery rhymes. He didn't care about the fact that sometimes he was out of tune, he just really got to experience the joy of singing, of reading, of talking to his children and I think for me I still feel quite emotional about that because he said that Reading Fairy had been
part of his personal journey and I like to think it gave him a lovely experience with his children.

What are the new challenges we are facing when it comes to encouraging a love of reading for pleasure at an early age?

Encouraging a love of reading for pleasure from an early age is really important, so it’s quite alarming if you look at the latest National Literacy Trust report on the decline in children's reading. I think we need to address that very seriously and understand what that means.

Some of it is due to negative screen time experiences, sometimes it’s because we are time-poor in terms of being able to spend the time to read with children. But I think we have a lot to do as a country to address this problem.

A big thing that we can do is think about reading in all its guises. We need to make sure that children are literate, so yes phonics is important, but we also need to make sure that we don't just skill and drill. We might get a child to be literate, but it doesn't mean that they're going to have a positive experience.
Now that we understand more about neurodiversity more needs to be done to make sure that things that might hold children back are picked up sooner, I know Jamie Oliver has recently done a campaign on dyslexia, and to ensure that we're not putting so much pressure on our children.

I think we need to have more story time; at home, but also in schools as well and actually as a nation. Story time is a time where we can experience other worlds, we can experience other people, we can have empathy for people.
The other thing is we need to value all forms of reading. Let’s not start to be snobby with our children about what they are choosing to read. If a child's reading the back of a cereal packet or a football magazine it's still reading. If they are reading at all then they're opening doors and then we can encourage them to read a whole host of other things as well.

I think that one of the single most important things that people can do - and this includes me - is to read more in front of our children, so it can actually be seen as
valuable. It’s the same with writing. When we were little, we would see our parents write shopping lists and to-do lists on paper, now it’s all on phones or computers.

There’s also a really important piece of work by the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) on reflecting realities and the importance of children seeing characters like themselves in books, also the importance of seeing authors and illustrators they identify with. If we can give children this wide experience then they're more likely to find something for themselves that they're going to love and enjoy.

Let’s get our kids reading, let's make sure that we're giving kids a diverse range of books, let’s visit our libraries, let’s be more mindful. Let’s bring back not just an early love of reading, but a continued passion for words and books.