Supporting my Child’s Reading

Reading at Chilmington Green

At Chilmington Green School, we believe that fostering a love of reading is crucial to students’ overall development of speech, vocabulary understanding and creativity. A strong reading culture for students is statistically proven to raise academic attainment in all subjects through understanding of vocabulary, structures of sentences and writing as well as creativity and thinking skills.

We have a reading programme during tutor time where students read twice a week with our current titles being:

Year 7 books

• Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan
• If I ran the Country – Rich Knight
• Dwayne the Rock Johnson – Lisa Williamson
• Skin of the Sea – Natasha Bowen
• Beowulf – Michael Morpurgo
• This Book Kills – Ravena Guron (Student choice)
• Where the world ends – Geraldine McCaughrean (student choice)

Year 8 books

• The Boy at the Back of the Class – Onjali Q. Rauf.
• Soul of the Deep – Natasha Bowen
• Mud, Sweat and Tears – Bear Grylls
• Wonder – R.J. Palacio

Guided Reading Books

• The Climbers – Keith Gray
• Lark – Anthony McGowan
• The Den – Keith Gray
• Frankenstein: A Retelling – Tanya Landman

Chilmington Green School’s Summer Reading Challenge

This summer, we are asking our year 7 going into year 8 students to read Kenneth Grahame’s classic novel: ‘The wind in the Willows’. Join Mole, Rat, Toad, Badger and many others as they navigate new weather challenges, going out of your comfort zone and enjoying adventures.

Our students have had a lot of fun reading the fantasy, adventure genres exploring characters that grow, change and learn valuable lessons. ‘The wind in the Willows’ is no different where the lovable animals explore and encounter a range of challenges along the way.

All students who prove they have read ‘The Wind in the Willows’ will be awarded 5 value points on their return to school. Additionally, if you prove you have engaged with either the Sparx or Library Summer reading challenge you will be awarded 15 value points!

The Wind in the Willows is free to read online as it is now in the public domain, or you can borrow it from the local library if you do not want to purchase your own copy. Additionally, it is freely accessible as an audio book on Spotify.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27805/27805-h/27805-h.htm

How can I support my child reading at home?

There is a lot you can do at home to further support your child with reading.

Engage with our local Library

Ashford Library located on Church Road in Ashford has a lot to offer to support your child’s reading. They offer a wide range of literature for students and a student library card which they can use to borrow books! Ashford Library is open Monday to Saturday except for Bank Holidays and membership is free to join.

Ashford Library are also promoting a summer reading initiative which you can find more about here with lots of prizes to be won: https://summerreadingchallenge.org.uk/.

Sparx Reader

Our students have been successfully using Sparx reader since joining in September and it is wonderful to see that collectively they have completed 2120 hours of reading and read 397 books!

Sparx reader are also launching a summer reading challenge from the 19th July to the 1st September. Any SRP earned by students during this time will count towards the challenge and students who are top achievers could win a range of prizes for the school as well as for themselves.

Good luck!

Engaging with interests

Reading for pleasure is always difficult when people are reading books that are out of their interests. We do everything we can at school to broaden the reading repertoire of students by exposing them to a range of genres. Fostering a love of reading at home, however, is best done when children are encouraged to read following their interests. Reading a book about something they love is better than not reading at all.

Routines

Routines are the most important when encouraging someone to read. Even 10 minutes a day can make a huge difference as students could be exposed to an extra 600,000 words extra per year. This 10 minutes could be 10 minutes before bed, as soon as they get home from school or after dinner. Having that set time builds expectation and children would look forward to this set reading time. Find a comfortable place with no distractions to make it an enjoyable time either reading with someone or individually.

Reading with your child

During term time we ask that students complete 30 minutes of careful reading to as part of their English homework. Often, students will complete this by themselves, but this is something that we welcome parents to help and support with at home if you wanted to read with your child to support their reading development.
At school, we adopt ‘reciprocal reading strategies to support their development with reading. This is something that you can try with your child at home.

1. Predict: This is asking students to consider what they think the reading will be about based on the title, cover or even considering what has been read so far. Ask your child to predict what they think it could be about and explain why they think that. E.g. there is a tree so I think it could be set in a forest which could be mysterious.
2. Question: As you are reading, it is really important to check students understand what they are reading as they read it. Therefore, quick questions along the way will help to encourage this understanding. E.g. ‘What has just happened here?’ ‘Can you tell me where you got that information from?’ ‘What does this word mean?’ ‘How is the character feeling?’ You could at this point ask you child to then predict what next if you wanted to ensuring they are engaging with the story.
3. Clarify: This is where you correct any mistakes that may have been made by telling them what a word means or searching it up with a dictionary or google together. Discussing what the importance of what has just happened is before moving on.
4. Summarise: Once you have finished reading a chapter or section of the book, ask your child to summarise in their own words what has happened. This encourages them to identify key information in a concise manner which supports their own thinking when engaging with all subjects!

We do encourage using a dictionary or similar to look up words you don’t know whilst reading. One of the major benefits of reading is that through exposure to new vocabulary, students expand their ‘toolbox’ of words at their disposal to articulate their thoughts and feelings more sophisticatedly and accurately as well as being able to access more content in their subject areas.