Helen Morgan, Subject Leader for Reading, English Lead Practitioner, More Able Champion & DDSL at St Michael Catholic Primary School & Nursery in Ashford, Surrey
With the ‘Year of Reading’ fast approaching, it’s a good time to re-assess the provisions in place for our children. As an English lead, questions I ask myself often revolve around the following…
- What are our children reading?
- Why do they make the choices that they do?
- In what ways can I support them?
This is especially important when it comes to children sharing what they have read, as I believe there are many effective ways to do this other than merely completing a reading record book. After I have read a great book (or a terrible one for that matter) there’s nothing I love more than discussing it with others. It was for this reason that I joined a ‘Teachers’ Reading Group’, facilitated by The Open University’s Reading for Pleasure volunteers.
The project I undertook at the end of the year involved setting up a staff book club where we read and discussed children’s books. It was very successful, in more ways than I realised it would be:
- We really enjoyed reading and discussing the texts.
- It broadened our knowledge of children’s literature.
- As staff finished reading the books, they were placed in class libraries.
- We noticed that groups of children were taking the books and reading them together, forming their own small book groups.
As the NACE lead at my school, I considered how I could use my findings to benefit more groups of children, so I started running a book club for our more able children. I adopted the Reading Gladiators programme curated by Nikki Gamble and the team at Just Imagine, which focuses on high-level discussion and eliciting creative responses to quality texts. Over the years these book clubs have been extremely popular, so we now run additional book clubs for less engaged readers and a picture book club with a focus on visual literacy.
Here are five reasons why I believe book clubs are a valuable way to foster reading for pleasure for all children, through informal, dialogic group discussion.
1) They develop critical and reflective thinking.
- Through guided discussion, children learn to justify opinions with evidence and challenge assumptions elicited from both the text and from each other.
- The discussions foster metacognition and allow children to deepen their thinking. Research has shown that this links to higher achievement.
2) They nurture social and emotional intelligence.
- Children build their skills in empathy through exploring different perspectives, including that of their peers.
- It allows children time to reflect on and enjoy what they are reading without the pressure of having to answer formal questions.
3) They foster independence and help children to make meaningful connections.
- Book clubs expose children to a wide range of texts that they might not choose independently.
- They enable leaders to read with rather than to children.
- Reading for pleasure thrives when children can relate what they read to themselves, other texts and the world, thus deepening their ideas.
4) They encourage dialogic interaction.
- Book clubs encourage children to verbalise their interpretations and listen to others’ viewpoints.
- Discussion helps them move from literal understanding to analysis and evaluation — exploring themes, author choices, and symbolism.
- Informal book talk enables children to build empathy whilst exploring different perspectives.
- Collaborative reading builds confidence, listening skills, and the ability to challenge each other’s thinking, which are key aspects of social learning.
5) They promote agency, create a community of readers and foster a love of reading.
- When children play an integral part in discussion direction, they feel ownership and autonomy.
- Book clubs shift reading from a solitary task to a social practice.
- This helps to build a community of engaged readers who are invested, curious and motivated.
References
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