Results of our Reading Survey

At the October Parent’s Evening we asked you to provide us with some information regarding your child’s reading habits. We are trying very hard to promote reading for pleasure within west Primary and would be interested to see if this is having an impact on your child and their attitude towards reading.

When we asked parents of P1 to P3 pupils the results showed that all of our pupils were being read to at home. 37% were listening to a book each day and 31% several times a week. This is great news! We could see that all children had access to books and that they talked about the books they were reading.

These results leave us with very little scope for improvement. We will look at the results as a staff and discuss how we can build on this strong foundation of reading for pleasure.

In P3-P7 there seemed to be more children reading less, or never independently. Some children had no access to books and some children rarely or never discussed a book they were reading with an adult at home. However, these numbers were still very low.

We are hoping to encourage our older children to enjoy reading independently and have already explored different ways of doing this in school.

All children are read to on a daily basis in class, usually at the beginning or end of a day. Children seem really keen to listen to a novel that their teacher is reading to them and this has prompted many children to read other books by the same author.

We are using the Zumba sponsor money to make our class libraries attractive and comfortable and to stock them with books that the children are asking for. There is independent reading time allocated throughout the school day.

Children are recording book reviews for assembly. Our reading scheme provides opportunities to read books and novels as well as a traditional reading book. We have purchased a new reading scheme for all ages.

We will repeat this questionnaire at the Parents’ Evening in March and compare results, hopefully we will see an increase in the amount of time that our older children chose to read.