Literacy at Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1

e. Reading for pleasure

Reading for pleasure

As teacher educators we have the opportunity to inspire and excite our student teachers as teachers of reading; we are responsible for improving their knowledge and their enjoyment of children’s literature. Guides such as CLPE’s Simply the Best: Books 0 to 7 years (CLPE, 2002), together with the literature-based approach to teaching reading outlined in The Core Book and the accompanying Core Booklist are extremely useful in introducing student teachers to new texts and ways of working with them in the classroom (Ellis and Barrs, 2005; Lazim, 2005). In the Early Years classroom this can be the most pleasurable aspect of their work. To inspire and excite we need to:

start with the student teachers’ own reading and offer them access to a range of the best of children’s books;
introduce them to books like Where the Wild Things Are, Owl Babies, Can’t you Sleep, Little Bear?, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, and authors and artists such as Shirley Hughes, John Burningham, Anthony Browne, Quentin Blake, Lauren Child and Charlotte Voake;
engage in shared reading and discussion with them;
encourage them to take these books into school to share with their classes;
suggest that they keep an annotated reading journal of the books they read.

In the Early Years classroom children’s experience is largely oral, so the teacher educator needs to prepare the student teachers to engage in a rich variety of oral activity:

poems for joining in and chanting;
traditional tales from around the world for telling and retelling;
stories that are rich in repetition;
drama and role-play related to the stories they are hearing.

All these should contribute to the children’s pleasure and enjoyment, becoming a vital part of the process of learning to read.

and

Nikki Gamble on Children’s Literature.

Contents

Further ideas and suggested activities