Liz Kenny, english hub lead, and Vanessa Hill, headteacher, at Whiston Worrygoose Main faculty in Rotherham speak about their strategy to encouraging studying, and the advantages it’s introduced their pupils.
Studying is on the coronary heart of every part we do
Whiston Worrygoose is a ‘Studying College’. Studying drives every part we do and it’s on the centre of our complete curriculum supply. Lecturers, dad and mom and youngsters all perceive the significance of studying and the advantages it brings. Our workers often learn with all our kids, and we actually encourage the kids to speak about their studying with ardour.
Growing workers information of kids’s literature
Enriching the studying curriculum for all kids and creating workers information of kids’s authors and literature has required willpower and dedication. We carried out a survey with workers that confirmed solely 38% of academics learn kids’s literature past the directed class texts. Employees weren’t naturally selecting to learn these books, so we decided to take a extra deliberate strategy.
We beneficial our favorite kids’s books, gave workers time to learn them and created an area to share their growing information of authors and their writing types. We positioned a selected emphasis on new authors and texts, and books aimed toward age teams past the precise key stage they labored in. We additionally coated particular genres and authors together with poetry and graphic novels.
Via this we supported our academics to re-ignite their ardour and curiosity in kids’s literature, and this elevated curiosity had such a constructive affect on our pupils. We’ve additionally seen a rise in instructor’s confidence in educating textual content choices and interesting kids in purposeful e-book discuss.
Get stuck-in, not caught
We’ve additionally launched a ‘love of studying’ tracker throughout KS2, and this has helped us monitor the kids’s e-book selections extra rigorously. Via the tracker we are able to see if a baby is ‘getting caught’ in a e-book that they’re not really having fun with, permitting us to make interventions and direct kids’s studying selections. By increasing instructor’s information of kids’s literature, we are able to rapidly introduce kids to various titles and authors obtainable in each our classroom and college libraries.
Sharing is Caring
One other constructive final result for us was that we noticed a rise in studying motivation amongst pupils. Attendance at our lunchtime library membership elevated considerably, and it was nice to see so many kids engaged in studying dialogue and constructive studying behaviours. One baby advised us “It was good to see the academics having fun with studying too and studying with us. It looks like we share the books collectively”, and that is the precise kind of expertise we would like them to have.
The youngsters additionally cherished our assemblies, the place a member of workers reads a e-book aloud to all the kids. This ‘Thriller Textual content’ has ensured that kids throughout the important thing levels have a shared expertise and it’s been fantastic to listen to the kids talk about the textual content at lunch and playtimes.
How we’re going to construct on our success
We’ve had so many constructive outcomes to date however our studying for pleasure journey is way from over. Over the subsequent tutorial yr, we’re going to construct on our momentum and proceed to strive extra issues to encourage our kids’s love of studying. We need to additional develop our instructor/guardian studying group and wish to proceed to develop our out of doors areas to advertise leisure studying even additional. We’re additionally hoping to develop wider group hyperlinks, together with forming studying buddies with residents of our native nursing dwelling.
As a faculty, we’re dedicated to persevering with to teach and encourage our pupils (and workers!) to learn for pleasure.
Thursday 7 March is World E-book Day, an annual studying for pleasure marketing campaign and celebration of authors, illustrators, books. For concepts and sources that can assist you have a good time, check out the World E-book Day exercise hub.
In case you’d prefer to encourage a love of studying at your faculty, interact with the DfE’s English Hubs programme. Literacy specialists inside every hub will present tailor-made help to colleges together with showcase occasions in educating phonics, early language and studying for pleasure.
To contact any of the colleges within the English Hubs programme, please go to the English Hubs web site.
