At Westbourne, we are constantly trying to come up with new and exciting ways to engage our children and develop a strong passion for reading in all of our pupils. This is what we call, ‘Reading for Pleasure’. Reading for Pleasure is when children develop a love of reading and want to pick up books to read at school, at home, and when you are out and about. It is also when children see books as a way to learn.
As a result of this, we have recently begun our ‘Reciprocal Reading’ strategy, so that reading becomes a really important part of each and every child’s life and children get the opportunity to explore and find meaning in texts. We focus heavily on ‘book talk’ and spend a lot of time discussing the books we are reading, as well as the tricky new vocabulary we come across. We then work together to unpick challenging texts, supporting each other in order to understand the text fully, using our key skills of recall, inference, prediction and summarising. This creates not only a passion for reading, but also encourages perseverance, with no text being inaccessible.
Across school, we encourage the use of reading skills across the curriculum and the teachers provide opportunities for reading in all subjects, so that pupils can research information for themselves, and present their findings in different ways. We call this ‘Reading to Learn’.
We have weekly visits to our brand new Research Centre, where we can choose and swap books that we are interested in, as well as research subjects that interest us online. Our school librarians work hard to arrange our many resources so that it is easy for us to locate books that interest us. We are allowed to take a library book with us, which we can enjoy at home!
Each class has a large and exciting selection of books, some of which have been chosen by the children, which they can read for pleasure.
