Reading for pleasure
Reading for Pleasure
Reading for Pleasure is extremely important to us at Springwell Park Primary. Not only do we ensure our curriculum is effective with its intent on creating excellent readers who are fluent and have strong comprehension, but we also work tirelessly to ensure we instil a lifelong love of reading within our children.
Our aim is for our children to want to pick up a book and read, as opposed to being asked to.
Reading for Pleasure Text
Every single class at Springwell Park have a Reading for Pleasure text. This is a high quality text that is separate to the texts on the writing and whole class reading Long Term Plans. This text does not have any work associated to it and is always read by the teacher - this means that it is pure escapism for the children. It is the chance for the children to get lost within the world inside the book. We find that the Reading for Pleasure text is, generally speaking, the text that creates enthusiastic readers. The children cannot wait to hear the next instalment of the story and are keen to engage in book talk and discussion.
Branching Out
Once the Reading for Pleasure text has been introduced to the children, a 'Branch Out' document is then sent home with the children. This is to encourage reading at home. The children will be able to get their own books similar to the one they are enjoying in class - it could be a sequel to the class text, a book written by the same author, or a book with a similar theme.
World Book Day
World Book Day is always a huge day for us at Springwell Park. We aim to create a day that is truly memorable for our children. Not only do we ensure it is fun for our children, but also that it is beneficial and serves a purpose. Last year, we enjoyed dressing up as a word in order to increase the presence of vocabulary in our school. Throughout the day, not only did we enjoy exploring each other's words, but we also created our own class dictionaries and also enjoyed workshops with authors.
Reading Presence Around School
If you take a walk around our school, you will see how important reading is to us. Our Key Stage 2 staircase has been rebranded as our 'Reading Staircase'. Each step is now home to a superb and high quality text. We are proud to say that our staircase is completely diverse, with authors and themes of LGBTQ+, neuro-diverse, disabilities, and ethnic minorities.
If you see books hanging over your head, this means that those books have been added to that class' 'read list'. This is a great talking point and creates superb book talk.
At Christmas, we enjoyed a 'Reading Advent'. Each class had a dedicated day where they were able to go to our Class Library and open that day's reading package. The Class Teacher was able to choose who went to the advent as a representative for their class and then the book took pride of place in the class
reading area.
We also have our very own Community Library. This lives in our playground and is there for our parents to help themselves to. We want our parents and carers to be good reading models to our children, therefore they are able to help themselves to books to take home and keep. We stock adult texts as well as children's stories.
