At Brookfield Park we understand the huge importance of supporting the development of a love of reading in all our children.

A love of reading is clearly well developed when a child has great word recognition and comprehension skills and also when the child loves to read in their spare time so that they can escape and travel to other worlds and interests.

Reading hugely helps your child to relax and unwind, by helping them to take time away from screens, gaming and social media thus supporting their wellbeing. Our ultimate goal for every child is that they read for pleasure, and choose a range of genres to enjoy.

We work lots on reading skills and promoting the enjoyment of reading at school throughout all of our English lessons, guided reading sessions and throughout the teaching of other subjects. We want the children to be exposed to a rich reading diet, in which they delve into the work of authors and genres that they would not have considered otherwise.

It is so important that reading skills are also developed at home too - there is more information on our homework page as to what is expected for reading homework, however encouraging children to read all sorts of texts and genres is fantastic! Reading also helps to improve spelling, grammar, sentence construction and helps to develop their imaginative ideas for their own writing. 

Our Class Novel

In class we enjoy sharing class novels. These are engaging texts to encourage the fascination of books for the children and hopefully develop their own love of reading. Listening to class novels also develops the children's own reading stamina by listening to modelled reading for a sustained period of time. It also supports reading comprehension skills as classroom discussion about the characters, setting, plot and more takes place and subsequently promotes these skills. Our class novel is at times, the text that will inform our writing, not just narrative but also a range of other text types such as diary entries, poetry, non-chronological reports, newspaper report, persuasive texts and more! 

Our class novels will sometimes be the text we are studying in English also. At other times they will be hand picked novels that will hopefully engage our children and open them to the possibilities of enjoying genres they may not have otherwise chosen to read.

"One of the very finest historical storytellers for children. No word is wasted, no emotion left untapped." Phil Earle.

Summer 1945. The Second World War is finally over and Yossi, Leo and Mordecai are among 300 children who arrive in the English Lake District. Having survived the horror of the Nazi concentration camps, they've finally reached a place of safety and peace, where they can hopefully begin to recover. 

But Yossi is haunted by thoughts of loved ones he has lost and disturbed by terrible nightmares. As he waits desperately for news of his missing father, he fears that Leo and Mordecai - the closest thing to family he has left - will move on without him. Will life by the beautiful shores of Lake Windermere be enough to bring hope back into all of their lives?