At Burton Joyce Primary School, our aim is to create lifelong readers, who enjoy reading and understand it as a valuable resource through which to view the world. Reading is a life skill; from starting out and learning to read, with phonics as the vehicle to facilitate this, through to using reading to learn and seeking out new knowledge. We feel reading is one of the building blocks of life and we aim to equip our children with a thirst for the written word, that will sustain them throughout their lives.

"after nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world." – Philip Pullman

How we instil a love of reading:

We foster the children’s passion for reading by starting in their comfort zone, surrounding them with books, reading books aloud, and modelling our own love of reading. Right from Foundation through to Year 6, we immerse the children in literature. We have daily story time – an unmoveable time slot that is dedicated to enjoying stories. Through this we have discussions about stories with the children – what do we enjoy about this story? Have you read any others by the same author? Does this remind you of other stories you have read? This language rich dialogue helps the children to see reading as something to be discussed and shared, and not necessarily a solitary activity.

We are proud of our rich and diverse curriculum and we are equally proud of how we incorporate reading into this curriculum. Through our dedicated UNITs sessions each day, children are exposed to a wide variety of stimulating texts that develop their comprehension skills, vocabulary and inference and deduction skills. In the wider curriculum, our text choices are wide and varied. We utilise the Education Library Service to ensure there are a wide range of texts – factual and fictional – ready for the children to access. The children are encouraged to research widely into their topics, through their home learning grids and these research projects also encourage them to seek out knowledge and understanding. Reading is reading. Whether it is in a book or on a screen and we encourage our children to read a variety of texts in different forms. Each one of our classrooms has a reading area that aims to be inviting and comfortable. There is a steady supply of high-quality texts available and the children are encouraged to read widely.

We celebrate national events, such as World Book Day and we spend the day reading and immersing ourselves in books and other activities linked to our reading. We welcome parents into our school to support with reading, both on a 1:1 basis, within our classrooms, and on a bigger scale where they are asked to come into read alongside their children and enjoy reading together.

We reward our children, whether it is by a sticker in their reading diary or on a whole school level through our Eric Ashworth Award, that recognises good progress and development in our readers. At Burton Joyce, we feel this praise and dialogue to raise the profile of reading, will help us with our overall aim of developing lifelong readers, who enjoy reading in all its various forms.

On the BookTrust website they have a Bookfinder tool. It's a great way to find books linked to your interests. 

They have also collated a list of the top 100 reads suitable to your age.