Reading cafe Kelly Grove
Context I teach at Altmore Infant School, a 5-‐form entry infant and nursery school that forms part of the Altmore and Lathom Federation in East Ham, London. My school is privileged enough to have a Children’s Centre on site which is visited by a wide range of the community, daily. From Reception to Year 2 we have 450 children along with 120 Nursery children and 2 year old provision. I am the Reading Leader for the infant part of the Federation. Developing reading for pleasure and home/school links is a priority on our School Development Plan and for my specific development plan as a Reading Leader. To date we have held five termly activities.
Research inspiration and rationale I was inspired by the TaRs research into the need to build an increased reciprocity between children, families and teachers as readers and the finding that suggested that new social spaces which encourage parental involvement need to be created; shared spaces and experiences for parents and children to learn together. At Altmore we have lots of parents who want to support their children with reading but lack confidence in knowing how best to do this. Aims My aims were and still are to foster a love for reading and to create a school where reading is exciting and enjoyed by ALL children. In this work though I wanted to increase school-‐parent communication about reading and for the parents to feel invested in by the school. My school is privileged enough to have parents who want to come to school to learn how to support their children at home and I wanted to take build on this. In particular I wanted to nurture parents’ confidence and give them and their children access to different types of reading strategies and different texts, and to share with them how these can be enjoyed, not just in school but at home too.
Outline As part of a 'Sharing of good practice' my school formed a partnership with schools in Rotherham. We each hosted a day to share best practice linked to reading and phonics. I was fortunate enough to visit a school where they had organised a Reading Café event on a small scale. The vision behind the Reading Café was to get parents in to choose and read books with their children. I decided to trial this concept in my school setting where I was aware parents would attend and enjoy such a session and where I support them -‐ to support their children at home. I decided to organise two different Reading Cafés: one focused on Modelling and one Book Sharing. 1.Modelling (1 hour session) In this Reading Café session parents had the opportunity to watch their child’s class teacher model reading and observe:
• general questioning about books • prediction • retrieval questions • inference questions
Example of parent support sheets:
They were then invited to participate in a craft activity related to the book with their child. The aim of this activity was to demonstrate how pleasure can be promoted through collaborative, interactive activities that don’t cost a lot of money but provide opportunities to talk further about different books. Lastly, parents were then given a sheet to take home to support them with different question prompts they could use when reading with their children.
2. Sharing books (half hour session) In this Reading Café session, parents were invited into classrooms at the start of the day simply to enjoy sharing books with their children. Classrooms were set up with books in all areas/spaces with lots of puppets, props and story sacks to engage children with texts. Books chosen in each classroom consisted of fiction books, non-‐fiction books, texts in dual language, ipads with stories on etc.
After the event In order to celebrate the success of the two Reading Cafés we created a school Reading Café Scrapbook to showcase the brilliant time all the children and parents had and we created displays around the school to remind children and parents of the event. Many photos taken have been showcased on our school website too.
Impact Parental feedback was extremely positive and it was great to see and hear that our parents felt empowered. Some voiced the view that they were starting to feel more confident in supporting their children at home in reading. Observing the families play with their children as they read has also helped the staff and myself think about how we communicate with families and how we can further encourage the joy of reading for pleasure, helping them begin to recognise reading as a social, active, affective and enjoyable event, not a struggle with sounds and words. I am also thinking about how we can diversify further the range of texts we have in our classrooms and would like to conduct a survey of both parents and children to see what other types of text they would like to have available, both at future Reading Café events and also in the classroom generally.
Reflections on impact the TaRs research had on practice What I hadn’t anticipated was the extent to which observing families engage with texts and activities during the Reading Café events has made me reflect on what it means to be a reader in the 21st century and particularly in our community – this is something else that I have taken from the TaRs research; learning from children and parents and seeking to create two-‐way traffic between home and school reading practices. We are lucky in our school to have parents who want to come in and support what we are doing. I am interested in seeing how I can engage parents in the junior school too. We have thought about running the Café on a much more frequent basis, but we don’t want to lose the impact and ‘specialness’ of this community occasion.
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