The photograph was taken on a race weekend. Reuben had been out on his bikes. Between races he went back to the caravan, sat down and read. His little sister Orla is next to him, trying to join in.
That is a picture of a boy who needs no persuading to read. Which is exactly why his mum Shaunie’s account of the National Read-Aloud Challenge is worth your time. Because Reuben was not sure about it at all.
The objection we hear most often
“At the start he wasn’t sure on the lack of actual book and using a tablet.”
That is the single most common hesitation parents raise with us, and it is a fair one. If your child already loves the weight of a book in their hands, why hand them a screen instead?
We are not going to argue that a screen beats a book. It is not the point. Fonetti does the one thing a book cannot do, which is listen. It hears a child read aloud, follows every word and responds as they go, which means a child can practise reading out loud whenever they want to, without waiting for an adult to be free.
What he was already reading
Reuben is six. He has just finished Year One and goes into Year Two in September, and he arrived at the Challenge with a reading habit well established.
He started out on the Julia Donaldson books, moved on to longer chapter books, and now counts Roald Dahl among his favourites. He has read the entire Treehouse series several times over. He has been through Marcus Rashford’s The Breakfast Club Adventures, books by David Walliams, and the older Thomas the Tank Engine stories that belonged to his dad. He brings fiction home from school and talks it through with his parents. As Shaunie puts it, he is a boy with plenty of questions about what he reads.
So for a family like this, the question was never whether the child will read. It is what happens when he runs out of things to read.
What changed
Two things, and neither was the one we would have predicted.
The first was comics.
“Since doing the read aloud challenge, he’s beginning to enjoy the comic strip books too, which previously he hadn’t shown any interest in. Just this evening he asked, please can I read the Agent Blue comic again?”
A confident reader picking up a format he had always walked past is worth more than a reluctant reader finishing one book. It is his taste widening, not his ability catching up.
The second was news. On that race weekend, the articles he kept going back to were about the World Cup.
“I’ve particularly enjoyed listening to him reading the news articles. With the World Cup, I wasn’t sure how he’d get on with all the names, but he did a fabulous job! His vocabulary is expanding daily by all the material accessible to him so that’s a real plus for us.”
This is the part that matters educationally. Unfamiliar names of players and places are exactly the words a child cannot guess from context or skip over silently. Reading them aloud is how they become sayable, and then usable.
The audience of one
Orla is three. She cannot read yet. She makes up her own stories from the pictures, and recites the parts she remembers.
“Reuben loves to read bedtime stories to Orla and therefore she has been actively involved in the challenge because she’s never far away listening, when he’s reading out loud.”
We did not design for that, and it is our favourite thing in this whole story.
There is a worry about technology like ours, sometimes said out loud and sometimes not, that it is there to take the adult out of the room. It is not. Fonetti is a Personal Reading Coach, not a replacement for the person sitting beside your child. Reuben read aloud to his little sister at bedtime, with his parents nearby. Fonetti did the listening in between.
One more thing
When Shaunie told Reuben she was writing back to the founder of Fonetti, he said: “Wait, Kim Antoniou has emailed you? Please can you tell her I really enjoyed her book Tech Gran in Tuk Tuk.”
Shaunie’s point about this is better than anything we could add. She did not know who had written it. Reuben did. He was not only reading the books, he was reading the introductions and paying attention to the details.
How they found us
One line in Shaunie’s email is a reminder of how families reach us at all.
“Thank you for exposing our school to the challenge, because otherwise we wouldn’t have known about it.”
The National Read-Aloud Challenge is free, and it runs every summer. If your child’s school has not mentioned it, ask them. Send them to readaloudchallenge.co.uk and we will do the rest.
Teach a child to read, and you give them the power to learn for life.