Reading
Festival of Reading
What a fantastic way to round off our year! Our Festival of Reading was packed with inspiring author visits, exciting activities, and special moments celebrating the joy of reading. Here's a look at some of the highlights:
Author Visits
We were thrilled to welcome a number of brilliant authors into school:
Hannah Shaw, creator of the Unipiggle series, led interactive sessions for Classes R, 1, and 2 — including a special workshop just for Class R.
Steve Skinley brought his book Otherlands to life for KS2, guiding children through a magical journey of trolls and creative writing in Cirencester’s historic spaces.
Anne Buffoni, local historian and former Stratton teacher, worked with Classes 5 and 6 to help them craft their own mini-books.
B. Ware, a local children’s author, delivered a whole-school assembly followed by inspiring workshops for every class.
Matt Oldfield, known for his popular sports biographies, shared his stories with the whole school.
Reading Escape Room
We turned the whole school into a reading mystery zone with Subject Revolution’s escape room experience! With reading-based clues, we solved puzzles to discover who locked the professor in the time machine — and revealed his (spookily accurate!) final prophecy.
Waterstones
To refresh our library shelves, some classes visited Waterstones to choose exciting new titles, with a focus on books to engage reluctant readers. Waterstones also generously donated book tokens for our Reading Review Competition — look out for the winning reviews on display in-store alongside our selected titles!
Read with Me
To support the amazing local reading charity Read with Me, the whole school took part in a sponsored fun run, raising a fantastic £400! These funds will go towards one-to-one reading support for children across schools.
Read with Me also hosted The Not So Secret Book Club, where every child got to choose a free book to take home and made their own beaded bookmarks too!
Reading Celebration Assembly
We wrapped up Festival Week with a wonderful outdoor celebration for the whole school community, including our preschool visitors.
We were honoured to welcome:
Councillor Sarah Orr, Mayor of Cirencester, who presented Reading Merits to children who have worked hard and shown real perseverance in their reading journeys.
Lavinia Sidgwick, Deputy Lieutenant of Gloucestershire, who awarded our Word Millionaire certificates and prizes. We were proud to see a record number of children receive these awards, including our first ever Triple Word Millionaire!
Special thanks also to our library storyteller Lisa and Neville from Forest Green Rovers, who joined us for some magical storytelling sessions.
Thank You
A huge thank you to our generous sponsors, without whom this incredible week wouldn’t have been possible:
The David Vaisey Foundation – for funding our Reading Escape Room and earlier Forest Green Rovers visit.
Nationwide Building Society – for supporting future FGR visits, the Reading Throne, Waterstones book trips, EYFS Literacy Shed, and enhancements to our reading corners.
Tesco Blue Token Scheme – for making this week’s amazing author visits possible.
It was a joyful, inspiring week filled with stories, imagination, and achievement, a true celebration of reading across our whole school community.
Exciting news for Reading!
We are absolutely thrilled to be receiving a fantastic grant of £4620 from Nationwide, to be spent on promoting reading in our school. This money will enable us to jazz up some reading areas in school, purchase a literacy shed for Class R, buy new books for our library and install a very special addition to our outdoor reading provision, which we hope to unveil at our Reading Festival at the end of the year. Huge thanks to Claire Vaughan-Watkins and Kate Morgan Evans for making this possible.
National Poetry day
Well done to all the children who learned a poem and performed it for their class.
Learning to recite poetry can have profound benefits for children: it helps develop language and vocabulary; it improves memory skills; it develops confidence with public speaking; and it develops awareness of emotions, cultures, history and other world views, all of which broaden their horizons.
We were super proud of those children who then helped us to celebrate National Poetry Day, by performing their poems to the whole school. We hope that some of them will now enter the Poetry by Heart competition, and be in with a chance of visiting London and performing on stage at the Globe Theatre.
World Book Day
We had great fun this World Book Day, enjoying all things to do with reading and books. We kicked off the day with our reading assembly, where we handed out reading merits and word millionaire certificates. We also sang the world book day rap and read our adaptation of 'We're going on a Bear Hunt'. During the day, all the children had the opportunity to visit the Scholastic Book Fair. With thanks to WH Smiths, all children were also able to exchange their book token for book at our pop-up book shop. During our Book Share time, children split themselves across the school to listen to a story of their choice. It was heart-warming to see children from Class R to Class 6, enjoying the same stories together. Outside, we had our book hunt: the children had to find and solve book themed clues in order to determine the location of their class's book prize. It was a lot of fun!
A huge thanks to parents who kindly supported the school by buying books at the Scholastic Book Fair. Thanks to you, we have a couple of hundred pounds to now spend on adding new stock to our library and classrooms!
Tweedy - The Clown Who Lost his Nose
Our favourite clown came to school this term to read us his new book, Tweedy - The Clown Who Lost His Nose. Tweedy proved to be a wonderful storyteller and adults and children alike were clamouring to see his new book and meet their new favourite author. We are already on the edge of our seats in anticipation of his next venture ... a graphic novel. Watch this space!
Look at our lovely new books!
Huge thanks to the Cheltenham Literature Festivals for donating this fantastic set of around 80 new books for our library, many signed by the authors. These books have been carefully curated over the last few years by the Reading Teachers Reading = Pupils programme. Reading Teachers = Reading Pupils (RTRP) is Cheltenham Festivals’ flagship outreach project designed to inspire teachers and pupils to read for pleasure because children who read for pleasure experience high levels of well-being, engage in learning and are successful in life. We can't wait to get reading them.
The Royal Society Book Prize
This year, we participated once again in the Royal Society's Young People's Book Prize, which aims to promote literacy in young people and inspire them to read about science. We were given 6 wonderful children's science books, which our KS2 classes enjoyed as part of their Book Share time. We have reviewed each of them in turn and our final judging panel convened to submit our responses and nominate our favourite book this year. This year, we chose 'Can you get Rainbows in Space?', by Dr Sheila Kanani. The children loved this colourful book, which had many fun and unusual questions that kept us wondering. So, if you have a budding scientist at home, they might just like this book.
The 2024 prize has now concluded and 'Can You Get Rainbows in Space' was announced the overall winner in a ceremony held in Glasgow. A huge well done to our panel for their work in choosing the winner.