We have always loved books, stories and reading at Garrick Green but we wanted to create a culture of reading for pleasure as well as focus being on the skills of learning to read.

We have been fortunate enough to have received a generous charitable donation from the Alderman Norman Foundation, and that added to money from Friends of Garrick Green, has enabled us to purchase books and reading areas for our school.

We talked to the children about what books they would like to have in the library and compiled a list of topics/themes and authors. The staff were lucky enough to visit Bookbugs and Dragon Tales, an independent children’s bookshop in Norwich, to purchase some new books for the library. Leanne, the bookshop owner talked to staff about current children’s books that are popular and made suggestions of books that the children at Garrick Green might like. The staff were very excited to look at all the books on offer in the shops and we came away with 2 big boxes to add to the library.

We also purchased new books to add to our collection of books that we read daily in each class. The children have thoroughly enjoyed listening to these new books.

In every class we have Everyone Reading in Class sessions (ERIC time) where we all read books either on our own or with a friend and we can talk about the book. The children relish the opportunity to choose the book that they are going to look at. They get the opportunity to change the books we have in class regularly by going to the library and finding a book that interests them and bringing it back to keep in class for a while.

We also wanted children to be able to read outside and we purchased an outdoor reading wagon and book barge plus comfy cushions so that the children could have somewhere comfortable to read at breaktimes and lunchtime. The children were very excited to see the structures being built and Leanne kindly offered to come to the opening ceremony of our new outdoor reading areas. We had a grand opening ceremony where the ribbon was cut to declare the outside reading areas open!                                                                                                                                                      

       

  

  

We are hoping to add more outdoor reading nooks over the next year.

We will develop the indoor reading areas in September which we are all really looking forward to.