Andhra Pradesh Minister starts campaign to promote reading habit among students

GUNTUR: Education Minister Adimulapu Suresh launched ‘We love reading’ campaign during a programme held to mark the Constitution Day at Venkateswara Vignana Mandiram here on Thursday. Speaking on the occasion, he said the concept of ‘We love reading’ is the brainchild of Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy. It intends to inculcate the habit of reading among students at an early age.

‘We love reading’, the one-year reading fluency campaign takes place in four phases -- preparatory, foundation, advanced and valedictory to improve the reading skills of children from classes 3 to 9, he said.
Home Minister Mekathoti Sucharita urged students to make reading of books and newspapers on a day to day basis a habit to gain knowledge and build their own personality.

The campaign aims at transforming non-readers into readers by cultivating the habit of reading and focuses on developing foundational literacy skills both conceptual and skill-based knowledge among the students of classes 3 to 9 and intends to build advanced skills after the foundation. The advanced skills include phonemic awareness, alphabetic principle, reading fluency, vocabulary among others. Awareness will be created on using e-books and digital libraries wherever infrastructure is available. So far, 45,359 schools have registered under the Readers Clubs and 72% of these schools have libraries. The existing school libraries and available village libraries will be strengthened and utilised for this initiative.