Doing my bit for Literacy

As Numeracy Co-ordinator I work closely with our school's Literacy co-ordinator, and in addition to that my husband has just got promoted at his school to be Literacy co-ordinator so I do feel a little bit of pressure to support the literacy initiatives in my school. Despite that I have a Year 9 tutor group who love to read, and I know there are so many benefits of encouraging this that I wanted to do my bit to promote literacy going into the new year.

Firstly I decided to create a "Book Box" for my classroom as we will be doing one session of silent reading a week during tutor time, and so often some students in my tutor group turn up without books, even if they do enjoy reading. I thought it would be a nice idea to have some to hand which they can choose from and I have enjoyed going around car boot sales and rummaging through charity shops to select some titles which may entice some of the less enthusiastic readers in my tutor group. I have even included some titles I enjoyed from my childhood including "Goosebumps" and have tried to consider what both girls and boys turning 14 would enjoy.

As well as the "Book Box" I have also spent a little bit of time creating bookmarks for each student in my group. It was very cheap to do and didn't take too long, I just bought some coloured card and ribbon offsets from Amazon, then a book of 1000 letter stickers and just stuck their names to a bookmark-sized piece of card. I'm quite proud of the outcome (being someone who is not very creative!) and I will have the bookmarks out on their desks in their new seating plan to try to promote reading from the word go this year. I hope it will also be a nice gift to start off the new term.

I would like to get the students to write book reviews of the books in the box throughout the year and put the reviews in a folder in the box to help other students select a book which might be of interest. I wanted to reward the students for doing this in some way, and may use raffle tickets to do so which could be drawn at the end of each term or the end of the year as a book token for a prize. I did also want to reward the students for reading books in a similar way but am not sure how have a fair system in which students earn raffle tickets without them playing the system and saying they have read a book when they haven't so I may need a little more thought on that one.