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Reading

At St Julian’s, we recognise that reading is vital to the progress a student makes across all subject areas, as well as reading for pleasure, and one of the best things you can do during this time of home learning is to encourage your child or teen to read and / or read with your child or teen and enjoy the drama of the story together (or discuss it at the end, or as you go along).

Reading will help support your child both educationally and emotionally. At KS3, all our students take part in the Reading Challenge, and we would appreciate you supporting them in this.

Free Resources to support reading

To help/encourage, there is a wealth of resources available. Fantastic read, respond & create resources are available for 0-5s / primary school age, older children and teens including creative writing tips from authors, 10 minute challenges, a Lockdown Children’s LitFest and children’s literature activities from the British Library. 

If your child or teen is not much of a reader here are some suggestions of great titles to get them hooked!  If you like to have book recommendations (including for younger children) you can tune into the National Shelf Service daily.  Or why not inject some poetry into your life with some of these activities or by engaging with performance poetry.

 

A great range of free ebooks and audiobooks are available:

  • You can access comics, magazines & ebooks online with a public library card: if you are not yet a member of the Newport Libraries, why not join or use the RBDigital (eComics & eMagazines) or Libby (eBooks & audiobooks) apps on your phone.

  • As well as the highly recommended Libby app, there are short stories from 100 authors in the new Book of Hopes, stories in 30 languages and lots of other free books are available via the World of stories, Project Gutenberg, Audible and individual publishers:

 

For younger children:

 

For older children: 

  • Puffin podcasts featuring author Humza Arshad (of Little Badman and the Killer Aunties fame – featured in the 2020 Lewisham book awards!)

  • Individual authors are reading their own books, talking about writing and more!  Some favourites are Lisa Thompson (LisaThompsonWrites on Instagram), Cressida Cowell reading How to Train Your Dragon, Piers Torday reading The Dark Wild

 

For teens:

 

For the grown-ups:

 

  1. St Julian's Reading Challenge
    pdf
  2. Reading skills Poster
    pdf
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