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Reading at Springwest
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At Springwest, we believe that everyone deserves a great education. We are relentless in our ambition to create a love of reading and believe that reading ability directly affects life chances.
For this reason, we have expanded our successful reading intervention programme to support as many students as possible. Currently, we have a total of 58 students doing reading interventions throughout the week in order to widen their vocabulary and increase their reading ability and comprehension. Students are really benefiting from these interventions and they understand the importance and the impact that reading can have, not only in school, but also to thrive in all aspects of life.
Year 7 students have been busy in ‘Fresh Start’ reading interventions. They are currently learning strategies to decode difficult words in texts. ‘Fresh Start’ teaches children to read and write through a systematic approach to literacy rooted in phonics.
Guided reading students from years 8-10 have been engaged in a number of interesting texts. During guided reading, students actively participate in the group reading process – by listening or reading – and making conclusions about the text. Students are actively questioned during the reading to promote thinking and comprehension of the text.
“The reading intervention is going to help me understand more words and uplevel my English. I enjoy being in the interventions because it’s a great opportunity to learn how to read better and they are fun”. (Guided reading Year 10 student)
"I have just finished reading my first book thanks to these lessons" (Guided reading year 8 student)
"Fresh Start is good because it helps you sound out lots of words and helps you to read better" (Fresh Start year7 student)
Our library continues being the epicentre of our culture of reading and many students use the library throughout break and lunch in order to revise or simply to have a quiet moment of relaxation with a good book.
We currently have more than 6000 books in our school library and since September, our students have borrowed more than 2000 books (1331 fiction titles and 723 non fiction titles issued). The students who have read the most books are Aaminah Aziz and Rida Imteyaz, who have read a Young Adult Fiction book every two days!
Teachers across all subjects at Springwest continue to explore possibilities in the classroom to promote reading more. In English, students read books such as McBeth, Blood Brothers and Julius Caesar and are exposed to the theme of Tragedy, in preparation for their GCSEs. Text books have been introduced to support accountable reading and this is weaved across the curriculum. In addition, teachers are exposing their students to high level vocabulary and encouraging them to memorise and use keywords for each subject through excellent Knowledge Organiser Homework Tasks that students are completing during Prep time, but also at home. Word of the Week also enables our students to discover a new keyword every week that will expand their vocabulary.
So far, these have been our Words of the Week:
- Emphasise
- Succession
- Perspective
- Voracious
- Ambiguous
- Predominant
- Feasible
- Articulate
- Indifferent
- Trivial
- Tirade
- Eccentric
- Adulation
