Reading at home
With a quarter of children leaving year 6 without being able to read properly, and 40% of disadvantaged children according to the National Literacy Strategy (2022), reading for pleasure has never been more important.
Sadly, it's not always easy to get families on board with reading at home, but this is a useful starting point for teachers of any year group. Closing the word gap: reading at home is a free resource created in partnership with OUP. Divided into easily-digestible sections for the three primary key stages, the resource offers tips and activities to get families reading, talking about books and taking pleasure in reading. Print out the relevant section and send it home to encourage families to share books and caregivers to become role models for promoting reading for pleasure.
Authors to inspire
In the classroom, you have a great deal more influence on the reading culture: how often and to what extent children engage with books. Our collection of book-based resources includes a range of texts and authors to appeal to a variety of audiences and develop reading skills. This collection of guided reading prompts and comprehension activities for the wonderful Julia Donaldson is perfect for EYFS, while these Oliver Jeffers activities for KS1 are sure to add to children’s enjoyment of reading and make them smile.
For KS2, these reading response activities for books by Anne Fine are always popular, along with this selection for the fantastic range of books by Michael Morpurgo. Our Harry Potter resources remain some of the most searched-for content on the site while fans of David Walliams might enjoy this new resource based on Fing. And, try as I might to avoid the obvious, it is impossible to write about reading for pleasure without mentioning our Roald Dahl collection.
Once you've made your choice and created a comfortable reading environment, these Guided reading tips offer some lovely suggestions to help your class to engage with books and become a community of readers!
You may find some inspiration on this ultimate bucket list of books to read from our sister site, Family Education. After all, in the words of Dr. Seuss, 'You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax, all you need is a book!'
