The planning process is an important one especially when tackling extended narratives. It acts as a bridge between children doing sentence/word level work, writing short extracts, and knitting all of these skills together into cohesive and finished stories. It allows…
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We have chosen some of our favourite scientific books – there’s something here for everyone to get geeky about! There is a mixture of narratives that contain scientific characters and contexts, narrative non-fiction texts that give us information about scientists…
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At this time of year we are thinking about transition from year 6 to year 7 and what better text to use for this than A Beautiful Lie by Irfan Master? Now, as this is a fairly meaty text with an intricate…
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This time of year always feels full of hope: the days are longer; the sun shines over our corner of the world (at least on some days) and there is a sense of life and light. And those are our themes for this month’s review - life…
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It is a usual Monday morning at school. I am charging around the corridors getting resources ready for the day ahead - the ever-too-short weekend already a distant memory. It is always on a Monday morning – at 08:30 GMT…
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There is much talk in the world of education at the moment around the ‘million word gap’ and we know that there is a direct correlation between how much children are read to and the size of their vocabularies. Unfortunately,…
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This was a fun list to write. Actually, this age is all about being a little humorous. So, how we did we choose them? Well, they needed to be books of the smaller variety, not too dense and ideally with some…
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In an age where mobile phones, email and social media allows instant and constant connectedness with one another, loneliness is a real issue for many people. And whilst loneliness can be something we all experience in our lives, it’s seemingly…
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How do we define ‘important’? Well, it’s a picture book so the pictures need to be good. And where there are words, they need to be good too. But more importantly the message needs to be STRONG and that will…
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In a change to our usual reviews this month, we were so overjoyed by the incredible selection of authors and titles included with this year’s World Book Day £1 books that we thought it would be very much remiss of…
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Fairy tales are vital to refer to for plot and character when it comes to teaching any narrative form... Hans Christian Anderson’s tales feature heavily here and The Brothers Grimm are widely attributed as being the collectors of many of…
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My first introduction to poetry was when I was seven. I was on a family holiday and, in an attempt to entertain, my uncle recited to me The Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. It was a remarkably successful attempt for I…
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This list is particularly important to us, and despite many of the books appearing on other lists of ours, it was felt that we needed to give these titles their own list and within the list, some sections to showcase…
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This month’s review explores the theme of perspective, in two senses of the word: keeping things in perspective and looking at things from others’ perspective. We need to be very careful that children have time and space to be still;…
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This time of year is all about new beginnings: it’s a new year; a new school term; the days are starting to become longer and many people make resolutions. Some might focus on being kinder or spending more time listening…
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We genuinely think there is little better present than to receive the gift of a book at Christmas. It can allow you to choose something so personal and thoughtful for a treasured friend to reflect your friendship or relationship, or…
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Self-worth: something that is neither pre-determined nor fixed. We all must have a sense of high self-worth in varying degrees at different points in our lives. Or maybe not. Maybe some people never have the sense that they’re of value.…
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We have always been big advocates of context. Our recent blog, ‘8 Reasons to adopt a book-based Approach this Academic Year’ identified that for many children, context is key, and that this can be a powerful engaging tool when it…
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