Hello!

How are you all?

Today, I thought I would share some pictures of the books my class are reading… cause they’re all reading some absolute corkers and I’m so impressed that they’re embracing the range of books that are available to them!

Starting this academic year, I really wanted to get my kids excited about books and about reading. I’m such an advocate for reading for pleasure that I want my kids to know that they can enjoy reading and that it doesn’t always have to be something they’re tested on… they just get to enjoy what they’re reading.

The children have free access to my reading area/library (full of books that I am sent from publishers, books I bought myself and books that are from our school lirbary). We have reading time every day after lunch – usually 20-25 minutes and they just lap it up! We’ve gone from having some really reluctant readers to children who are racing through different books and it just makes my heart so happy.

I had a lovely moment with one of my boys the other day when we were just doing some sentence writing. I asked them all to write a sentence about books and he wrote, “I hated books until I came into Miss Elliott’s class,” and it took everything in me not to have a total weep!

I’ve been DELIGHTED with the range of books they’re reading. A lot of the children are on book 3 or 4 so far this year with me encouraging them to read a mix of novels and graphic novels. There’s all sorts of representation in these books. There’s stories these children might never have come across. There’s such a lovely mix of genres and interests here. There’s fiction and non-fiction. They’re just lapping up all of the books and it makes my heart so happy.

I always want my classroom to be a classroom full of books and joy for reading. I’m a big believer in the power of the right book. There’s literally 100s of books in my classroom… just all over (I think it drives my TA mad ha!) but I wouldn’t personally have it any other way.

At the end of the day, we have 10-15 minutes where I read to them, so we’re currently reading My Life As A Cat by Carlie Sorosiak. We’ve finished, and adored, Zombierella by Joseph Coehlo.

Our first unit of writing was based around Quest by Aaron Becker, which they absolutely adored! This is the second time I’ve taught this class – I taught them Autumn term last year – and we did Journey last year, so I thought it was about time for us to do Quest… and we might even get to Return in the Summer term too! I am a big big believer in using picture books in KS2… and even more so wordless picture books!

Our whole class reading text this half term is Holes and they are INTO IT. It’s not for all of them, but on the whole they are into it. We’re doing lots of different activities around it and they’re really impressing me!

I could continue rambling on about books for hours. It is completely and utterly one of the biggest passions I have in life. I am a firm believer in the power of reading for pleasure, but I won’t ramble on (if you’d like me to, then by all means let me know in the comments because that’s something I can talk about for words and words… it’s what I did my dissertation on!)

Let me know if you’d like any more tales from the classroom and I could probably make it into a series! Leave me some questions if you have any!

Speak soon,

S x