Our school has been on an epic reading journey to say the least, from no library to an embedded reading culture. You will find reading advocates everywhere – one year 6 teacher promised her class at the start of the year, that she would read one children’s book a week and then place it on the class bookshelf for the children to read. We have been lucky to have two author visits in what can only be described as an exhausting and challenging time for all. Roving Books provided a great service to support our author visits by Stewart Foster and Ross Welford (highly recommend), more on those here. As a result of the huge buy in to reading that we have created, we were lucky to receive commission by way of BOOKS!
As reading lead, I am always thinking of ways to evolve our reading strategy, I don’t think it will or every should be complete, it needs to adapt with the times and needs of our pupils. One area we have worked a lot on recently is weaving non-fiction links to the wider curriculum into our reading lessons. I have blogged about the importance of non-fiction here, Inspired by Ashley Booth’s reading curriculum, I have been trying to collate and devise non-fiction links in a variety of genres (songs, picture books, newspaper articles etc) to support the wider curriculum in our school. This needs to be a whole-school view, where have children been in their learning journeys? Where are they heading? What do they need to know in order to comprehend the world around them? Basically what do they need to know and remember (learning).
Comprehension, I find, gets lost in questions, it is not simply a case of giving them questions to answer, a reading assessment is testing their knowledge – what they know and understand about a given topic. We have an inset day coming up after half term, and as reading lead I amongst others will be discussing non-fiction. When I met with senior leaders this week, we agreed it would be better to demonstrate how to weave links to the wider curriculum into lessons and the importance of hearing it from a variety of sources (not always me) and often. We all agree that non-fiction is important but finding the links can be the tricky part. As teachers, we can be guilty of tunnel vision, only seeing what occurs in our year group. It is therefore vital that onus be imparted to educators being involved in curriculum design, sequencing and an understanding of the key stage rather than the year group being taught.
The task, now at hand, is to devise some sort of curriculum map in an OliCav representation to show how and where the links lie across the key stage. In Year 5 for example, their autumn class reader is Letters from the Lighthouse and in Year 6, children study The Battle of Britain, so we must consider what essential information and non-fiction links are vital for children to know in order to support and extend their learning. Light is studied in Year 3 and built on in Year 6, electricity in Year 4 and again in Year 6. Year 4’s spring class reader is The Firework Maker’s Daughter by Phillip Pullman, invoking themes of fireworks and volcanoes. When children move to Year 5, they will study The Shang Dynasty in history lessons. It is important to make explicit links to both children and adults and to draw on prior learning.
Non-fiction is not just a factual book, most texts (fiction, picture, songs, articles) are based on facts – The Highland Falcon Thief series by M.G Leonard and Sam Segman provide children with a rich knowledge and understanding of locomotives through the narrative of a mystery story, supporting and lending itself to discussions or teaching about The Victorians or the Industrial Revolution. The Cogheart series by Peter Bunzl is a steampunk story set in the Victorian era, the sequel, Moonlocket supported our light topic in science with its reference to refracting diamonds and also brought their previous learning from Year 5 bubbling to the surface with constant reference to the moon phases and constellations, not to mention opening to door to exploring escapology (the antagonist being Jack Door – a notorious escape artist – aptly named as pointed out by one of my pupils after the thieving birds). This lead us to explore a fact file on Houdini, the picture book Escape from Pompeii (links to volcanoes in Year 4) and a newspaper article about Alcatraz. This also tied in quite nicely with formal writing in English, supporting their learning of newspaper articles. From this we looked at the picture book: Tuesday, which has no words, we devised inferences about the story, linked and wrote paragraphs to varying newspaper article structures based on the pictures. If the picture was best suited to a witness statement or the title for example.
The shift will be from a focus on the class reader to how the class reader can support and lend links to the wider curriculm.
Non-fiction needs to be the thread that ties the curriculum together.
What are the best links you have found to support children’s learning?
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