Tag: reading for enjoyment

Active Literacy at Ladeside Primary School

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Here’s what’s going on at Ladeside:

Our Literacy RACI group has been focusing on reading for enjoyment. We have several classes involved in Paired Reading. Older pupils have been trained to buddy younger pupils. P7 been reading with LHS pupils at LHS Library. Calum Smith has been facilitating this. Yvonne Manning trained P6 pupils as storytellers. We have had a huge amount of input from the storytellers from Larbert community library and Falkirk Council’s Learning Resource Centre. We participated in the Scottish Children’s Book Awards by reading the novels and voting.

What do the pupils say about paired reading at Ladeside?

P.6 Big Buddy talking about EAL P.3 pupil:  “I feel that my Little Buddy’s expression and volume has improved since I started reading with him.”

P.6 Big Buddy: “I think that Paired Reading is important for the future because the younger pupils get help to understand reading better and then they will get a good job when they grow up.”

P.6 Big Buddy: “ Paired Reading helps with everyone’s confidence. At the beginning, my Little Buddy didn’t want to read and now she always wants to read by herself.”

P.6 Big Buddy: “The Paired Reading training will help me in the future not just when I read with someone but will help me to be a good learner and mini-teacher too.”

P.3 teacher: “Paired reading has been a great success with my Primary 3 class. The Primary 6 pupils were well organised, confident and excellent role models at reading. The Primary 3 pupils involved really looked forward to the days their Primary 6 buddies were coming. They read a variety of appropriate texts and were able to discuss them with their buddy and answer relevant questions.”

Parent of Big Buddy: “He’s having a really great year. We’ve heard all about the Reading Buddies. He was so happy to have been chosen.”

Scottish Children’s Book Awards

This year's shortlisted authors.

The Scottish Children’s Book Awards are run by the Scottish Book Trust with support from Creative Scotland. It is voted for entirely by children, with over 38,000 children across Scotland voting last year. 

Falkirk Council’s Learning Resource Service is leading an initiative to add value to the Book Award for local nurseries and primary schools, which aims to promote reading for enjoyment and to motivate our children to become lifelong readers.

The schools will follow the Scottish Children’s Book Award ‘Bookbug Reader’ (3-7) and ‘Younger Readers’ (8-11) categories.

The Learning Resource Service will provide copies of the shortlisted books and organise a celebration of reading event to showcase the literacy work attended by the shortlisted authors.

Sharing ideas

This year 19 nurseries and primary schools are taking part and there is a lot of great literacy ideas and work being created.

Here are some great ideas to use with the book, Attack of the Robot Chickens by Alex McCall from Antoinette Irwin, St Joseph’s PS:

Attack of the Robot Chickens Apostrophes

Attack of the Robot Chickens Comprehension

Attack of the Robot Chickens Metalinguistics

Attack of the Robot Chickens

For more information, please contact the Learning Resource Service on 01324 501980, lrs@falkirk.gov.uk.

I Like Big Books!

Larbert High School has highlighted the value of reading in this parody you tube video entitled ‘I like big books’.

The video can be viewed by clicking on this link.

 It was produced as part of Literacy Week 2013.

Active Literacy is used in all Falkirk establishments and aims to develop six key reading comprehension skills which are:

  1. Prior knowledge and understanding
  2. Metalinguistics
  3. Visualisation
  4. Inference
  5. Main ideas
  6. Summarising and paraphrasing.

All six comprehension skills are explicitly modelled and taught and pupils then apply these skills across a wide range of texts across a variety of genres.

RED Book Award

 

The RED Book Award is Falkirk Council’s book award for 13 and 14 year olds and has been running since 2006. 

In April each year members of the RED Book Award committee read and reduce a long list of books from nominated titles to the 4 shortisted books which have that WOW factor. The books also have to be published in paperback in the previous year and the authors must agree to attend the award ceremony in Falkirk in January. Multiple copies of the shortlisted titles are sent out to each High School librarian in August and the RED Book Award journey of reading enjoying and debating begins.

This year’s shortlist is:

Raining Fire by Alan Gibbons

Rat Runners by Oisin McGann

Mosi’s War by Cathy MacPhail

Soul Shadows by Alex Woolf

The award ceremony  The 300 young people and invited guests take part in this event which is full of energy and passion! The young people present a creative interpretation of the shortlisted books, senior pupils act as reporters on the day working with the Council’s Press Office, a local school radio station SMFM (St Mungo’s High School) produce a radio broadcast of the ceremony. There is entertainment supplied by the talented young people of Falkirk Council and a question and answer session leading up to the opening of the red envelope to reveal the winning book. Last year’s winner was Slated by Teri Terry.

This year we are continuing with an international dimension. The librarian at an international school in Nairobi, Kenya has agreed to shadow the RED book award again with her reading group of children from the surrounding slum areas. The children will read the books, write reviews and will film their creative interpretation of one of the books which will be shown during the award ceremony.

“Thank you so much for everything this week. I had the best time at the RED book awards. I think having the colour red as part of things added such a fun element to the day. I really enjoyed myself, and was amazed at how good the presentations by the schools were.” Teri Terry