From the Deputy Principal

Learning to Read (and Loving to Read)

There is a lot of conversation around at the moment about reading and how children learn to read.

This is really important.

We know that students’ ability to read is a strong indicator of future success both at school and beyond.

At St Paul, we know this and we are always striving to help our children be the best readers they can be.

We also know this: that evidence shows that reading for pleasure or enjoyment has strong benefits for children’s academic performance and for their psychological wellbeing. 

We, therefore, have an obligation to teach our children explicit reading skills but also to create a culture that develops their love of reading and that will see them want to read for their own enjoyment. 

As a school, we use the Readers Workshop approach as our framework to achieve this. 

Within the Readers Workshop structure, we: 

• Encourage children to find, read and share about books they enjoy;
• Explicitly teach children the sounds, letters and word elements they need to know to be able to read words;
• Explicitly teach children reading comprehension strategies so they can find details, infer meaning and make sense of texts;
• Create a culture of talking about reading, just like adult book clubs or online reading forums;
• Introduce children to a variety of book types so that they can expand their reading diet and find new books they are interested in.

We see with our children their love of reading every day and it is wonderful to see our new littlest readers discovering that they can read for themselves, whether it’s reading pictures or reading the words. It’s affirming to hear our new children sharing how they’ve discovered or rediscovered a passion for reading and it’s exciting to hear some of our older readers share their love of reading with other children in our school.

If you would like to support your child to develop a greater love of reading, here are some ideas you might like to try: 

• Talk with your child about the books or texts you are reading;
• Ask your child to read to you or to tell you about what they are currently reading;
• Find real world texts your child can read for you, such as menus, timetables, trading cards etc.
• Use the lyric function in Spotify or Apple Music to encourage your child to read and think about the text in their favourite songs (be careful with which songs you do this with!)
• Consider an ebook app such as Epic where your child could find different books they might prefer reading or even read along books where they can listen to the book as they read.

If you would like to read more about reading, Lisa Burman is a literacy expert who works with our teachers and has shared some thoughts here: