Reading Scrapbooks and Brilliant Reading Leads
In the summer of 2020 I saw a
lovely post by Ceridwen Eccles (@Teacherglitter) where she had made a reading
scrapbook of all the books that she had read over the summer and was going to
share with her class for them to then do the same. It was stunning. At the
start of the school year I saw that our reading lead (@AmieC53) had also
started one over the summer. It too was stunning.
At home my two daughters were
good, interested readers so I decided to start one with each of them. There
wasn’t a right lot going on in Greater Manchester at the time (and Tier 3 would
last for A LONG TIME!) and it became a weekly thing that we did - Saturday
mornings was Reading Scrapbook Time! It’s definitely one of the best things we
ever did.
I started sharing the
pictures on Twitter and always received lovely feedback from authors… apart
from one who never acknowledged the posts and will remain nameless (they were
probably too busy with their other careers).
Oh, and for the record it
wasn’t Walliams.
The scrapbooks of my daughters
still remain two of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen in my life. Yes I’m
biased but I love them and love looking through them still. I got really
excited about the idea of getting these into schools. I messaged Ceridwen and
Jon Biddle who helped me form a group in regards to a plan about this but I’m
not sure if you remember 2020-2021 but it was quite a crazy year and the
(correct) decision was made to leave them until the Summer term to start. Which
we did, quite a few schools got on board and it was a success.
In my own school the
scrapbooks were great. There was so much interest in them and the entries were
continually gorgeous and wonderful. And it was at this point I did what any
respectable teacher/middle leader/subject lead/SLT would do… I analysed the
data!! Get in.
We hadn’t prescribed any
rules about what books the scrapbook could be done on (you can’t and please
don’t) but I knew what I was going to find. We’d also asked the staff to do
their own entries as well.
The Results
We did the scrapbooks from
Years 2-6. On average there were about 12 entries in each one.
Here are the Top 3 most
popular authors across the whole school.
In 3rd Place…..
Guy Bass
I was genuinely chuffed with
this. His books are ace (perfect for LKS2) and he’d done a brilliant author
visit in 2020 and another brilliant virtual visit early in 2021 so they kids
knew his books well. Off to a cracking start. Look at the reading culture of
this school!
In 2nd Place……
David Walliams
Next!
And in 1st
Place…..Roald Dahl.
What a shocker.
In 4th Place was
Enid Blyton (boosted mainly by staff entries) and 5th was JK
Rowling. Of the five JK Rowling entries, one was The Ickabog, one was Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and the rest were simply Harry Potter with no
book specified. The most popular book was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
which appeared four times across the different year groups.
This data is kind of
disappointing but there were reasons to be cheerful! This was the list from a
Y4 class:
And here is the list from a Y6 class:
You can’t argue with either
of those lists in my opinion – they’re chock full of the kind of books we want
children to be reading at that age. I knew that the school was moving in the
right direction but there were things that needed acknowledging.
- Walliams and Dahl
DW
popped up everywhere. It was disappointing but not surprising. We don’t push
his books in our school, we don’t buy them and we don’t recommend them but they
are in the class libraries though the school hasn’t purchased any of them in
the last few years. I’m not into hiding books from children or putting them in
the bin, that doesn’t solve anything. We just needed to make sure we were
recommending better books. I like Roald Dahl, I really do, but the world of
children’s literature is a far bigger place than just him.
- Staff needed more guidance.
The
staff entries in the scrap-books looked fantastic, but the choices of books
were not always very inspiring. I’m not saying that if you work in a primary
school you should be a fountain of knowledge in regards to children’s
literature but… no actually I kind of think you do. I can say that knowing full
well that I spent years not being, and I don’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge
of children’s books now but I’m pretty good. It’s made me better at my job.
- Lower Key Stage 2
We
needed more books in this part of the school. It seemed to be the
long-forgotten area and the class libraries simply didn’t have enough good
books in them for the children.
Now, the good news is that
whilst I was doing all this analysing, our reading lead was WAY ahead of me.
Good reading leads are worth
their weight in gold in a school. Our reading lead (@AmieC53) is awesome. She
lives and breathes children’s books and her classes are always surrounded by
brilliant books (that’s her Y6 scrapbook list I showed earlier). She’s also
developed a fantastic guided reading scheme for the school.
She decided we needed to be
more prescriptive with the class readers and we needed our class reads to be as
inclusive and reflective as possible. We weren’t going to showcase Black
History Month, we would have inclusive, representative books throughout the
year and throughout the school. The result? 5 class reads (plus a free choice)
where each teacher has a choice of 3 texts based around the following areas:
Short and Sweet (all
Barrington Stoke books)
Representation Matters
Reading with Empathy
Understanding Disability and
Neurodiversity
Building Understanding
My eldest daughter is in Y4
and if she was at my school her teacher would have these choices:
We’ve also invested heavily
on non-fiction in the last couple of years at our school as well. Our next
project – again organised by our reading lead - is to do one of the brilliant
Wishlists through A New Chapter, with a huge focus on LKS2 books and getting
even more inclusive books across the school.
The scrapbooks have continued
this year and again they are wonderful.
The
reading culture will take time but it will happen, and I’m excited to be a part
of it and support in any way I can.