Jeanette Winterson, inspired by Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,imaginesa letter from Hermione to Perdita writtenduring the sixteen years she is adoptedby persons unknown, following her father’ssavage abandonment and her mother’spresumed death. This exhibition brings together that which Wilde's final works so eloquently delineated: the pain of separation, the excruciatingly slow passage of time, betrayal, redemption, and love. Re-reading, too, can be a fresh encounter. In The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems by Thomas A Clark, the sea-washed Scottish pastoral has a moral wisdom so tactful I missed a lot of it first time around. Clark tells us how to walk, how to look. One untitled sonnet warns him “not to focus, not to bear / down heavily on the evidence / but to hover, vigilant and tender”. The climate emergency, of course, demands decisive political action. Clark reminds us that the stepping stones of eco-consciousness lie in habits of deep attentiveness. Olinghouse, N., Graham, S., & Gillespie, A. (2015). The relationship of discourse and topic knowledge to writing performance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107, 391–406.

In another study , researchers measured how reading a novel affects our brains. The study's participants read the novel "Pompeii" by Robert Harris, and as tension in the story developed, more areas of the brain were activated.Similarly, whenever you read a novel, you have to remember tons of information about the story's plot and subplots, the characters and their relationships, and the environment in which the story takes place. For the first year of his sentence, Oscar Wilde was forbidden to write anything beyond the occasional letter. In 1896 a more sympathetic governor took charge and allowed Wilde sufficient paper to write De Profundis. Taking their cue from Wilde’s literary reflection on his separation, nine contemporary writers have composed a letter to a loved one from whom they have been separated by state enforcement.In some cases, these are written from direct personal experience of imprisonment. Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well." Saddler, B., & Graham, S. (2005). The effects of peer–assisted sentence combining instruction on the writing performance of more and less skilled young writers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 97, 43–54.

The upshot? Reading every day can improve your memory –it can help you learn how to store new information and recall memories more effectively. 5. Enjoy EntertainmentTake a look at this great article on examples of bad dialogue. Most of the examples are hard to read, awkwardly constructed, and a bit cringey. Can you explain why some of these examples are bad writing? If you can, you’re reading like a writer.

It might seem like a step too far, but it can actually be really helpful for your child to write their notes out again after class. Particularly if they were writing up a visual or auditory source of information where they will have had to focus on listening and looking as well as writing, they may find their notes aren’t as thorough or don’t make sense in some places. While the information is still fresh in their mind, rewriting their notes will help clear up any mistakes and help the information sink in better. Thankfully, one of the key benefits of reading is that it helps you practice concentrating on just one thing at a time. As well as students who learn best from reading and writing, the VARK framework also identifies visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners too. Discover more about these in our Ultimate Guide to Learning Styles in the Classroom. Use visual aids appropriately– Learners will benefit from visual aids that are textual in nature. Using charts, diagrams and graphs that include plenty of written content will help them to better understand concepts.

Reading like a writer means being impacted by a piece of literature and investigating how the writer did it.

Graham, S., & Hebert, M. (2011). Writing-to-read: A meta-analysis of the impact of writing and writing instruction on reading. Harvard Educational Review, 81, 710–744.Ehri, L., Nunes, S., Willows, D., Schuster, B., Yaghoub-Zadeh, Z., & Shanahan, T. (2001b). Phonemic awareness instruction helps children learn to read: Evidence from the National Reading Panel’s meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 30(6), 250–287.