Reading at Home and in School

We believe passionately in the power of reading at South Craven, and do all we can to develop it in transition.

Reading is essential to academic success across all subjects. As importantly, it is good for our mental health - it allows us to enter other worlds.

Reading improvement, like all skills, is about regular practice: if you stop reading your reading skills will stop progressing!

Reading in Years 7 & 8

Accelerated Reader

Accelerated Reader is computer programme used to motivate students to read, monitor their progress and reward them for doing so.
It ensures students read the right book for their ability and checks their understanding of a book they have read.
It also promotes and encourages regular reading practice, both at school and at home.
Students will take a STAR test in September, January and April that will generate a reading age and a book level. They can then choose books that fall within their book level and are appropriate for their ability.

Key Websites

Renaissance Home Connect

Improves the school-to-home connection
Allows parents and students to log in to a website and view the student's reading practice and their progress towards their goals
https://Ukhosted50.renlearn.co.uk/1916523/HomeConnect

Accelerated Reader Book Finder

Allows students, teachers and parents to check the level of any book
www.arbookfind.co.uk

Love Reading for Kids

Has a number of recommended books for children aged 11 and above
You can filter by age or genre
www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/genre/12/11-plus-readers.html

A Parent's Guide to Accelerated Reader

Has some further information about the programme and how it can aid your child’s reading progress
www.renaissance.com/2016/09/09/parents-guide-renaissance-accelerated-reader-360/

Reading in School and Reading for Pleasure

Year 7

In Year 7, we read the following texts, among others, throughout the year:

The Bone Sparrow - Zana Fraillon
Macbeth - William Shakespeare

Further reading students might want to do at home to support these are:

Text

Year 8

In Year 8, we read the following texts, among others, throughout the year:

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
The Tempest - William Shakespeare

Further reading students might want to do at home to support these are:

Text

Reading in Year 9

Year 9 Book Club

Students are invited to be part of our Year 9 Book Club
This is a new initiative that will involve the whole year group and is the focus of all their English homework this year
Parents, guardians, teachers and form tutors will also be a part of this
It is designed to build on the Accelerated Reader approach students are used to from Years 7 and 8, but in a more collaborative and mature way
Every week, students should read something, whether that be an ongoing novel, poetry, non-fiction, drama or even a fiction extract
They will fill in a log, not so much explaining what they have read, but questions their reading threw up, or something interesting that they learned.
The Year 9 Book Club website should help with this.
It contains information about a number of recommended reads, loosely linked to their schemes of learning for each term.
This is not a prescriptive list, but somewhere to turn if they are unsure.
Parents / guardians also have access to this website, via the link below, to enable support
https://sites.google.com/southcraven.org/year9bookclub

Reading in Years 10 & 11

Key Websites

CommonLit

A library of texts
www.commonlit.org/en/library

Love Reading for Kids

Has a number of recommended books for children aged 11 and above
You can filter by age or genre
www.lovereading4kids.co.uk/genre/ya/YA-readers.html

Reading in School and Reading for Pleasure

At Key Stage 4, we read the following texts:

Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

Further reading students might want to do at home to support these are:

Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Freefall - William Golding
The Diary of A Young Girl - Anne Frank
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

If students want to read for pleasure, recommended books for their age group are:

The Lord of the Rings - J R R Tolkein
Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
1984 - George Orwell
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Pride & Prejudice - Jane Austen
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky

Reading in Sixth Form

Key Websites

JSTOR

Seach journals, primary sources and books
You will need to set up a login but the resources are free
www.jstor.org

The British Library

The national library of the United Kingdom
Gain access to the world's most comprehensive research collection
www.bl.uk

Reading in School and Reading for Pleasure

At Key Stage 5, we currently read the following texts (these are subject to teacher discretion and may change):

A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennesse Williams
The Duchess of Malfi - John Webster
Hamlet - Wiliam Shakespeare
Mean Time - Carol Ann Duffy
Selected Poems - John Keats
The Whitsun Weddings - Philip Larkin
Selected Poems - Ted Hughes
Selected Poems - Sylvia Plath
A wide range of fiction and non fiction texts
A wide range of different media texts including music videos, radio, newspapers and film

Further reading students might want to do at home to support these are:

The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language - David Crystal
Rediscover Grammar - David Crystal
Language and Social Contexts - Amanda Coultas
How Texts Work - Adrian Beard
You Just Don’t Understand: Men and Women in Conversation -Deborah Tannen
The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Mean and Women Really Speak Different Languages? - Deborah Cameron
The Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Glass Menagerie - Tennesse Williams
The Crucible - Arthur Miller
Tess of the d’Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy