“A book is a dream you hold in your hands.” Neil Gaiman
We are a class who loves stories and we try to encourage reading throughout the day and year.
Calm Cosy Corner
A very important part of our classroom is our calm corner. Here we can take time to chill out, read, listen to an audiobook or do a jigsaw. We have made the space comfy and calming using a sofa, cushions, blankets, a bean bag and cuddly toys. Our cosy corner sits next to our class library but we also have baskets within it with our favourite books, audio books and books linked to our topic. In our cosy corner we store our fidget toys and ear defenders so they are nice and handy when we need them. Miss Burton added fairy lights to the area so we can have some relaxing lighting while we read.
Book Voting
We use a book voting system to choose our story of the day. Miss Burton adds two books to the station and we use pebbles with our names on them to vote for the one we want to hear. She will also let us choose books to put in the station if we ask. By doing this we get to experience a variety of different stories and everyone gets a vote.
Personal Reading Time
Every day after we have brushed our teeth we get 10 minutes of personal reading time. During this time we make the class nice and quiet and use a focus timer with relaxing music to put us in the most comfortable state to read. Some of us read together and help each other with the words, some of us use pictures to tell the story and some of us are challenging ourselves to read some of the red shelf junior novels. We really enjoy this time and Miss Burton reads her book as well to model good reading habits.
Reading for Wellbeing
Over the last few sessions we have used a variety of books to help us cope with aspects of health and wellbeing.
Every year at the start of the session we read The Colour Monster and The Colour Monster Goes to School to talk about feelings and introduce our check-in system. We use the different colours from the story as our indicators of how we are feeling each day and post our wooden heart into the drawer for that feeling, then mark the check-in book.
Another book we have used in recent years is Beautiful Oops. This is a lovely book that shows us that a mistake is just another way to learn and we can turn our mistakes into something beautiful. We loved studying this book and creating our own Beautiful Oopsies.
Favourite Book Gallery
Below is a gallery of some of our other favourite books.
