One of our core aims and objectives in school is to immerse our boys and girls at all ages in books and literature so that they may become more fluent, confident and capable readers. More importantly, it is also to instil in them a genuine love of reading and willingness to read for pleasure, ultimately turning away from digital devices that otherwise dominate so many of our young people’s lives recently.
To that end, we engage pupils in countless opportunities to read in scenarios such as in small paired sessions, in group settings, through class novels and shared experiences, in the outdoor reading areas developed over this past few years and basically by any means possible. One core element of this whole school approach to encouraging and motivating pupils to want to read, is in our use and monitoring of the Accelerated Reader programme. Whilst the Accelerated Reader platform in and of itself, does not instil a love of reading in pupils, it does however provide us with invaluable insights into how much reading pupils are engaging in, at what level they are engaging with books and how consistently across the school pupils are reading!
Having evaluated and monitored the programme's usage over the past year, we were delighted to celebrate the wonderful achievements of our pupils prior to the of last year and present them with certificates, medals and cash vouchers recognising their individual and collective efforts. All in all, the following awards were presented;
1. Vouchers and Medals to Multi-Millionaires (pupils who have read 2million words or more!)
2. Vouchers and Medals to Millionaires (pupils who have read over 1million words!)
3. Gold Medals to Half-Millionaires (500,000 words or more)
4. Silver Medals to Quarter-Millionaires (250,000 words or more)
5. And class parties to each class for reaching their collective targets!
The winning individuals are pictured with their awards and we congratulate each and every one of them for their fabulous individual efforts. However, they were also equally backed up by their class peers who collectively, in striving to reach their respective class targets, read an astonishing combined total of over 30,000,000 words in one year! A truly astonishing achievement across the classrooms and a true testament to the success and impact of the strategies used to embed a genuine love of reading in our school!
