Our Workshops
Our interactive workshops ‘explore’ wider reading choices for small groups of students in primary school libraries. They aim to excite children about books and encourage reading for pleasure.
Format:
* Duration/Venue/Number of Students: Our workshops take place in the school library working with small groups of 6-8 students. Based on a class of 32 pupils, we have designed workshops for Year 2 (4 x 30 mins sessions for 6-8 pupils each) and Year 5 (4 x 40 min sessions for 6-8 pupils each). We aim to cover a whole year group in a week.
* Books: For a class of 32 students, we would workshop 32 different books, one for each student, over four workshops. We determine the extracts and choose and supply the books. Often there is a theme for each workshop, for example, books about ‘Amazing Adventures’.
* What Schools Need To Do: Apart from booking out the library space and working out the groups of children, there is nothing a school needs to do. We encourage schools to follow-up and buy the books the children have enjoyed for their school libraries. Sometimes we are able to supply a small selection of books free of charge and we'd love to know how often these books are read.
Content:
Each workshop has roughly the same structure:
* Reading Aloud with inferential and open questions designed to intrigue a child and really ‘hook’ them into the stories. The students each have their ‘own book’ for the duration of the workshop which they ‘unwrap’ and then read aloud from. We determine the extracts, the book choices and supply the books. The books are drawn from classic reads as well as a number of more recent prize-winning books or great books from other trusted sources (e.g. lovereading4kids.co.uk, booktrust etc). We find that more confident readers support the less confident ones, it’s a key part of the Book Explorers’ ethos that every child gets a chance to read out loud.
* A Creative Element. Over the course of the workshop we play games based on our reading extracts. The workshops introduce the concepts of ‘character’, ‘plot’ and ‘setting’ and look at how these elements might influence why we like (or dislike!) a particular book.
For Year 2, this is very light touch and we mostly concentrate on remembering the books with memory prompts.
For Year 5, we might also manage to unpick some of the ‘GENRE’ specific elements.
Book Explorers want to get kids reading so each child gets to VOTE for the books they’d most like to read. A child can vote for one book or all eight workshopped books. We compile the votes and feed the information back to the schools. We hope that the school might subsequently buy the most voted for books for the library. For some schools, we are delighted to have been able to supply a few of the best loved books free of charge. We’d love to know if the kids borrowed these books from the library after our workshops, please drop us a line at [email protected].
* Duration/Venue/Number of Students: Our workshops take place in the school library working with small groups of 6-8 students. Based on a class of 32 pupils, we have designed workshops for Year 2 (4 x 30 mins sessions for 6-8 pupils each) and Year 5 (4 x 40 min sessions for 6-8 pupils each). We aim to cover a whole year group in a week.
* Books: For a class of 32 students, we would workshop 32 different books, one for each student, over four workshops. We determine the extracts and choose and supply the books. Often there is a theme for each workshop, for example, books about ‘Amazing Adventures’.
* What Schools Need To Do: Apart from booking out the library space and working out the groups of children, there is nothing a school needs to do. We encourage schools to follow-up and buy the books the children have enjoyed for their school libraries. Sometimes we are able to supply a small selection of books free of charge and we'd love to know how often these books are read.
Content:
Each workshop has roughly the same structure:
* Reading Aloud with inferential and open questions designed to intrigue a child and really ‘hook’ them into the stories. The students each have their ‘own book’ for the duration of the workshop which they ‘unwrap’ and then read aloud from. We determine the extracts, the book choices and supply the books. The books are drawn from classic reads as well as a number of more recent prize-winning books or great books from other trusted sources (e.g. lovereading4kids.co.uk, booktrust etc). We find that more confident readers support the less confident ones, it’s a key part of the Book Explorers’ ethos that every child gets a chance to read out loud.
* A Creative Element. Over the course of the workshop we play games based on our reading extracts. The workshops introduce the concepts of ‘character’, ‘plot’ and ‘setting’ and look at how these elements might influence why we like (or dislike!) a particular book.
For Year 2, this is very light touch and we mostly concentrate on remembering the books with memory prompts.
For Year 5, we might also manage to unpick some of the ‘GENRE’ specific elements.
Book Explorers want to get kids reading so each child gets to VOTE for the books they’d most like to read. A child can vote for one book or all eight workshopped books. We compile the votes and feed the information back to the schools. We hope that the school might subsequently buy the most voted for books for the library. For some schools, we are delighted to have been able to supply a few of the best loved books free of charge. We’d love to know if the kids borrowed these books from the library after our workshops, please drop us a line at [email protected].
|
|
Suggested Book Explorers Workshops
If there is a particular genre your students are enthusiastic about we can source a workshop to cater for their interest.
We are DBS checked, please let us know if this fulfils your safeguarding policy requirements. In some schools, we have managed students without the need for a member of staff to be present throughout.
- Scary Book Explorers
- Mystery Book Explorers
- Animal Book Explorers
- Adventure Book Explorers
If there is a particular genre your students are enthusiastic about we can source a workshop to cater for their interest.
We are DBS checked, please let us know if this fulfils your safeguarding policy requirements. In some schools, we have managed students without the need for a member of staff to be present throughout.
