Library Mission Statement
Our mission at the Community College Library is to make reading accessible and enjoyable for everyone – staff and students alike!
For many, the mere suggestion of ‘reading’ produces negative feelings.
Our aim is to try our hardest to find the right book for the reader so they can’t put it down!
How do we do this?
We need to shift our focus away from thinking that novels are the only books you can read for pleasure.
There is no one way to read and certainly no one way to enjoy reading.
With this in mind, we have stocked up on our graphic novels, magazines, picture books, short stories and non-fiction books to motivate our readers to find what suits them!
Parents and carers can play an important role in supporting their child to read.
Here are some ideas on how you can help: Promoting Reading at Home
Book Reviews
Promoting Reading
Reading to learn ; Reading to understand ; Reading to enjoy
Intent of the Reading Strategy
Our students’ success will be defined by their ability to read fluently and skilfully. We want to develop a reading culture at the Community College so that every student can achieve their potential. We also want to promote the importance of reading to help make sense of the world as well as a source of pleasure.
Implementation of the Reading Strategy
Library initiatives:
- Revamp of the school library. Books categorised by genre.
- Termly student voices to determine what student want from their school library. Appointments of KS3 reading leaders (also on Student Senate.)
- Regular promotions and display changes – ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’, ‘Ask the Book Jar’, ‘What should I read next?’ etc.
Reading lessons:
- Students free to select books of their own choosing. Reading lesson staff will be responsible for checking suitability.
- Teachers listen to students read. This takes the form of group reading of either a class text or solo reading on their own text.
- Teachers note down progress and targets and liaise with the English teacher, who in turn, liaise with the student’s coach.
- Year 9 reading lessons devote time to the texts studied in English Literature to ensure full understanding. This is done before they study the text in their English lessons. This is combined with regular reading like that of the Year 7s and 8s.
Whole School
- Coaching groups provide a monthly recommended read which is displayed in the classroom. This is timed with the Student of the Month nominations to ensure consistency.
- House competitions linked to reading.
- Book reviews on display and in Messenger a range of fiction and non-fiction texts. Linked to subject areas.
- Teachers to feel more confident to consider strategies to support reading – CPD to encourage teaching of key works, looking at etymology of words, using pictures to aid understanding etc. This will be supplemented with resources available on the whole school CPD site.
- Reading intervention from LSAs for students with significant negative gap between reading age and chronological age.
- Reading ages to be shared with staff to inform lesson planning so that resources are matched to student’s needs.
- Subject based reading tests to be completed in coaching. They will answer 5 questions of varying difficulty, from retrieval to inference. This will supplement the above data and measure progress and inform intervention
Impact of the Reading Strategy
- Reading ages from primary school as part of Year 6/7 transition information are used to inform intervention.
- NGRT test for all KS3 students to garner reading ages biannually (paper copies for selected students) will provide data to measure progress and inform further intervention.
- Results from subject based reading tests will supplement the above data and measure progress and inform intervention.