9 exciting ways to teach reading for pleasure

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

KS2 Teacher and English Lead, Sophie Bartlett, highlights the benefits of reading for pleasure, and shares some ideas on how to instil this in your pupils._

“If you are a literate child who reads for pleasure, then this has more of an impact on your future life chances than any other factor. Encouraging reading for pleasure is a social justice issue.” – CLPE's Reading for Pleasure research, January 2021.

It is vital that we instil a love for reading within our children. Reading for fun has so many benefits:

The benefits of reading for pleasure

• It expands vocabulary. The more children read, the more words they encounter; the more words they encounter, the more words will enter their vocabulary!

• It develops empathy. Some children will only experience different types of people, families, cultures and experiences through reading about them in books.

• It improves imagination: many children often struggle with creativity when left to their own devices – whether that’s in writing, art or even playing a game outside. The more exposure children have to different plots, settings, characters and worlds, the more varied the ideas they have to inspire them when having to think imaginatively.

• It increases general knowledge. Perhaps more commonly from non-fiction, but where else better to learn something than from a book you’re enjoying reading?!

• It contributes towards accelerated academic progress - read more here and here. Reading more is linked to improved maths, text comprehension, grammar, spelling and writing in general.

A key part to developing a love for reading in the classroom is to ensure access to good quality children's fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, but also a range of graphic novels, audiobooks, and digital texts; children should be aware that reading doesn’t always have to be from a book.

9 ways to encourage reading for pleasure

As well as providing a rich and varied diet of texts, there are many other ways we can keep our pupils engaged and motivated with reading for fun.

1. Reading for pleasure displays

A display is a great way of showing the importance you place on reading in your classroom. For the last few years, I have developed a ‘connections’ board, see here, where children identify any links between all the different books we’ve read in class (both during English lessons and class story time). This is a constantly-evolving display as we replace and add books throughout the year – now the children love to call out ‘connection!’ during any reading of a text!

Reluctant readers often don’t understand the ‘point’ in reading – across the past few years, many different authors have given their opinions on ‘Why should I read?’ and these could be displayed around the classroom (example here but there have been many more updated versions).

A book recommendation display works really well, such as this example from Year 6 teacher, Cassie Hayward-Tapp @CassHT.

Another popular display for book recommendations is a ‘Bookflix’ one, inspired by the Netflix homepage [there are SO many examples of this on Google!]

A different kind of reading display is this from Year 6 teacher Emily Weston, @primaryteachew.

Each child responds to a different question weekly, but answering based on their own reading book. The questions created by @CassHT can be found here.

In order to model how we as adults also read for pleasure, you could also share which book you are currently reading on your classroom door, or somewhere the children regularly see it (and don’t forget to update it!)

2. Reading at home

I’ve personally never been a fan of physical reading records in KS2, particularly UKS2, and so have used Padlet for the last few years to track what my class are reading.

Each week, you could set a different question and the children respond based on the book they are reading (the questions could range from something like ‘What is a new word you have learnt from this book and what does it mean?’ to ‘Which is your favourite character in this book and why?’). These can then be shared and discussed with the class each week.

3. Parental involvement

Make sure that reading for pleasure is a topic of conversation every parents’ evening. Do the adults caring for that child know which books their child likes to read? Do they read with them? How often are they hearing or seeing them read? Ask them if they would like recommendations of books for their child – in my experience, parents have always welcomed this with open arms.

There are many book list recommendations online for different age groups you could share – or, even better, give some personalised recommendations based on that child’s reading ability and interests. If you aren’t sure yourself, Twitter is full of people with a wealth of knowledge about children’s books, all of whom would be willing to help.

4. Choosing a book together

As suggested in this blog, allow the class to choose their class story rather than picking one yourself. Choose 5-6 high-quality texts (or more, depending on how much time you have!) and discuss them with the children – show the front covers, read the blurbs and maybe the first page. Get children to vote for their favourite one!

This has previously been referred to as the ‘World Cup of Books’; Ashley Booth has shared one recent version here for UKS2 if you’re not sure where to start with this, but you don’t need a PowerPoint for this – you can just share the books themselves!

Related content:

21 fun and exciting teaching poetry ideas and activities

Improving Reading at Greater Depth

Common English SATs misconceptions

5. Book round robin

Ask each child to bring in one of their favourite books (a recent choice!). Pair up the children and label them A and B. Give the children 1 min each to talk to their partner about their book – why they like it and why other people should read it!

After each partner has shared, ask child B to move on to the next seat so they are now sat opposite a different child A. With a class of 30 children, once the full rotation has been completed, each child will have been recommended 15 other books to read – hopefully amongst all of those, there will be one they want to try next!

6. Interact with authors

So many authors of recent children’s books are willing to engage with teachers and their pupils on Twitter. Find the author of your class story on Twitter and drop them a message – in the past I’ve received personalised Twitter messages, handwritten postcards and letters, bookmarks and even Skype calls. The children get so much more out of a text when they’ve interacted with the person who actually wrote it!

7. Rethink reading awards

Every school will do this differently, but it’s just something to think about – if you reward children for reading, what are you actually promoting? Rewarding for number of books read penalises those who struggle to read as they will never get through as many books or pages as those more confident readers.

You could consider rewarding for time spent reading as opposed to the amount read – although, even then, are children reading for the right reason or for the extrinsic reward? Consider whether it would be more beneficial to remove or adapt reading rewards to ensure you are developing a genuine love of reading in your children.

8. Doodling

Most of us will use texts in our English lessons, whether that’s for reading or writing study. I always like to have two books on the go at once: one in English (perhaps linked to our topic or another high-quality text that demonstrates particular linguistic techniques) and one as our class story which I read at the end of every day (or any other spare 5-10 minutes throughout the day).

This will be a personal choice for each teacher, but I know that when I’m listening to something, I like to doodle – keeping my hands busy helps me to focus. During our class read, I allow the children to doodle (in my experience, their hands and/or eyes go wandering anyway if they’re not allowed to ‘do’ anything whilst they listen!) and they LOVE this part of the day when they can just relax and enjoy a good ol’ story!

9. Learning by Questions (LbQ)

Learning by Questions have got some fantastic texts designed to be read for pleasure and encourage pupils from Years 2-6 to read to a greater depth. They include original stories written by LbQ authors and adaptations of classics, with each text requiring children to respond to a variety of question types, including retrieval, inference, language and open-ended written responses.

LbQ provides the lexile scores in the notes for each text, so that teachers can ensure that their pupils get the right amount of challenge as they read.

Perfect for front-of-class reading and discussion, you can sample one of these texts here.

You can try it for free, here.

There is arguably nothing more important in the school day than reading your class story. The children can tell what is most important to us by what we prioritise in the classroom – try to make sure that shared reading time never drops off the timetable. Even if that means sharing a poem just before lunch-time or allowing children to read their own reading books as they come into school, ensure you fit in some sort of reading for pleasure (not just study) at least once every day.