Pearson Schools Blog

"Boys do read - sometimes more than girls. They just don't talk about it as much, or pretend they're reading, as some girls do, to keep you happy!" The authentic voice of real-life experience from leading school librarian Eileen Armstrong, with whom I collaborated to produce the government-backed ‘Boys into Books’ initiative back in 2007. Is the issue of boys’ reading still ‘a thing’, 14 years on? 

As we come up to half term, will you be assessing children using the half-termly Power Maths Progress Tests? Don’t forget that you can enter scores into the online Markbook to track and analyse results against age-related expectations.

If you were asked to quickly picture a mathematician in your mind, what would that person look like? How old would they be? What gender? And what about the colour of their skin?  
 
To mark this year’s Black History Month, we consider how to best achieve Maths diversity, with the wisdom of Susan Okereke. 

Your October Primary Update

In June this year, we kicked off our Share a Read campaign to encourage more people to pick up a book and feel the benefits of reading for pleasure. We wanted you to discover new books and share the joy of reading them with everyone. 

‘If I visited your school’, I often ask teachers and school librarians, ‘would I know that it’s a school that values reading… before I got to the library?’ (This assumes the library’s lively, well-stocked, welcoming, and used). ‘Would I see photographs of a recent author visit on your entrance area’s computer screen? Would I see, at child’s-eye level in the corridors, jumbled book titles, ‘children’s picks’, and author bios? Are there poems in unusual places, like the back of toilet cubicle doors?   

Do you remember reading and writing for pleasure during your school days? Perhaps your class had a cosy nook for devouring books during breaks – or maybe a teacher enthused you with the joy of making up your own stories just because. If so, you may not realise what a great springboard that was for later life.

When a child makes the leap from reading because their teacher tells them they must, to reading for pleasure, they have picked up a good habit for a lifetime. True, not everybody is a great reader, and we all have our own unique skills to offer the world, but anybody’s reading can improve with time and patience. This is especially true for children who have the advantage of minds that are keen to learn and absorb information. That’s why helping children to keep gaining confidence in their reading, whatever their natural ability, is so fundamental and it is best achieved when the duty is shared by homes and schools.