Reading for Pleasure

Reading for Pleasure

Reading for pleasure is one of the core values we promote across our school and is embedded into our culture at Fullbrook. We encourage all of our students, as well as our staff, to develop a love of reading and celebrate those who share their knowledge and enthusiasm with others.

We not only love reading but we understand how crucial reading is to student attainment across all subjects. Recent research from the Institute of Education found that children who read for pleasure are likely to do significantly better at school in all subjects than those who do not. We want every child at Fullbrook to enjoy reading for pleasure and to reap the rewards that come with it; as such, we continually engage with and implement the latest evidence-based approaches across our school to promote reading for pleasure and improve literacy outcomes for all of our students.

Further research demonstrates:

• Students who read for pleasure for 20 minutes + a day are likely to score better than 90% of their peers on standardised tests
• Students who read will have a 9.9% advantage in Maths by age 16
• The strongest factor affecting pupils’ science scores is reading comprehension
• Reading improves vocabulary by 26% regardless of background
• Reading also develops confidence, improves self-esteem and increases empathy.
• Reading aloud to students promotes their comprehension and reading fluency
• Echo and choral reading markedly improves reading fluency

There really are no disadvantages to reading and we see it as our role to ensure that every child in our school reaps the endless benefits from it.

Everybody Reads

We make it our mission at Fullbrook to ensure that everybody reads. Not every child has access to wide-ranging literature at home, and those who do will find themselves enriched and challenged further by the reading opportunities at Fullbook.

Everybody Reads….in tutor time:

Our core reading for pleasure strategy provides exposes every student, every day, to the joy of reading. Our tutors, regardless of what subject they teach and the age of their tutor group, read aloud to our students in tutor time for 20 minutes a day (with the exception of our assembly days!)

We expose our students to a diverse range of award-winning and age-appropriate fiction and non-fiction to inspire, engage and enhance their love of reading. All of the texts they read are linked to our Fullbrook Journey and Cultural Calendar to promote their wider social and cultural knowledge and development.

Having our tutors read aloud to our students not only promotes reading fluency and comprehension but also ensures our staff get the opportunity to share their love of reading with our students and promotes our whole-school reading culture.

Everybody Reads…in class:

All of our staff, regardless of subject and role, understand the intrinsic importance of reading. Regardless of what classroom they are in, all students will be exposed to:

• Direct vocabulary instruction. Learning new words and how to use them is intrinsic to success across a range of subjects. All of our teachers see it as their responsibility to teach and embed new and sophisticated vocabulary into their students’ repertoire.
• Echo and Choral reading. Both these strategies involve reading out-loud to students and students repeating the words they hear. Research shows both strategies enhance comprehension and fluency and our students participate in Echo and Choral reading across all subjects as a matter of routine.
• A wide-range of comprehension strategies that are proven to work, such as, questioning, making predictions, vocabulary exposure.

Everybody Reads…in the library:

At Fullbrook, we are really proud of our excellent library and library team. We expose students to the latest literature and non-fiction alongside the classics and encourage them to take books home. By the end of KS3 all of our students:

• Have had regular class library visits (1 every 2 weeks)
• Have had lots of opportunities to take books home
• Received expert support in terms of choosing books and developing their interests
• Been exposed to a wide-range of reading challenges, competitions, and literary events
• Developed the skills to utilise the library at KS4 and beyond
• Paired Reading Scheme – Year 7’s share reading time with Year 10’s and Year 8’s share with Fullbrook6