Category: reading for pleasure
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Miss P’s Literacy Calendar 2021-2022
It’s that time of year again! As you all know by now, I love to plan ahead and each year I update what I call my ‘Literacy Calendar’ to include key dates, competitions, book awards, events, days and weeks that help to inform my school planning for the year ahead. This is my third year…
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Non-Fiction November
How many non-fiction books can you name? What about non-fiction books that were released in the past couple of years? For many of us, this is much harder to do with non-fiction than with fiction or poetry. So, to celebrate non-fiction November, I have produced a Padlet of the UKLA Book Awards Longlist 2021 (non-fiction…
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Visualisation and Art
Visual imagery is essential for memory, day dreaming and imagination. It can also be used as a powerful classroom tool and, when embedded in the writing process, can produce amazing results. I originally discovered this technique a few years ago during a training course led by the CLPE. I am a big fan of their…
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Reading Aloud: The Poet-Tree Project
This project was inspired by the Teachers as Readers (TaRs) research and through my role as the leader of an Open University/UKLA TaRs Book Group (you can find out more about that here). Our book group is based in Blackheath and meets approximately once per half term. We share and discuss children’s literature and explore…
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2019 Egmont Reading for Pleasure Teacher Awards
Yesterday I was honoured to receive the 2019 Egmont Reading for Pleasure Teacher Award, in the category of experienced teacher! The announcement was made at the OU/UKLA Finding and Sharing Pleasure in Reading Conference in London, where I also led my first workshop on The Power of Reading Aloud. My RfP journey started little over…
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The Power of Reading Aloud
“Reading to children should not be presented as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.” (Kate DiCamillo) Everybody loves to be read to. Almost everyone has nostalgic memories of being read to as a child, or reading to their own children or grandchildren. I was lucky enough to…
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Cosy Reading
Just because independent reading does not have a learning objective attached to it, does not mean it isn’t valuable. Just because it cannot be tested, does not mean it should lose curriculum time. Sadly, creating time and space for reading is something that many teachers struggle with (given the ever-increasing demands on our already crowded…
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Encouraging Book Clubs at Home
The Teachers as Readers research project (Cremin et al, 2008) highlights the importance of relationships between children, teachers, families and communities and how this has a strong influence on RfP (Reading for Pleasure). I wanted to build reading relationships beyond the classroom not only between the kids in my class but also between the children…
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Writing Rivers
I originally saw Jon Biddle‘s excellent Reading Rivers report on the Open University’s Reading for Pleasure website. It stems from an idea originally explored by Pamela Burnard (2002) whereby the ‘river’ was used as a reflective tool to represent key musical experiences. It was then further explored by Gabrielle Cliff-Hodges (2010) with secondary readers and…
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Inspiring Reading & Writing: Launching a Magazine
If your school does not yet have its own magazine or newspaper, founding one can be an amazing opportunity to encourage reading and writing across the whole school community. It’s a fantastic way to get kids into journalistic writing, generating their own ideas and taking ownership of a producing a publication. Starting from scratch can…
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Book Clubs for Teachers: Widening reading repertoires
I had known for some time that my knowledge of children’s books was a weak area and when I came cross the Open University’s self-review document for teachers whilst scrolling through twitter one day, I thought, ‘why not?’ I clicked on the link and started dutifully answering the questions. It was worse than I thought. I was lured…
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Blind Date with a Book
I was thinking about National Libraries Week (taking place from 8 – 13 October 2018) and how we might celebrate our much-loved school library, when I stumbled upon the idea of having a blind date with a book. The aim is to encourage children to explore new genres and authors in an exciting, engaging way and the ‘blind…
Literacy with Miss P 