Reading at Hazlegrove: The Perfect Escape
Director of Studies, Mr Edwards, closes the term talking about the wonderful reading at Hazlegrove:
We’re quite proud of our reading culture here at Hazlegrove: our partnership with Renaissance Learning enables us to run termly reading challenges such as the Millionaires’ Club (where children who read a million words in the autumn term earn a badge and an exclusive Members’ Only Lunch in our beautiful library at the end of term.
We also run other homegrown challenges, encouraging pupils to compete against each both as individuals and classes in challenges such as Kidz in Space (where classes convert words read into light year distances across the universe) and our Fantasy Fiction League, leading to a head to head face off between the two top-scoring classes, and our summer holiday London Underground Challenge, where the pupils travel on the tube virtually, picking up ideas for reading at each station they stop at. Each line has a theme (Bakerloo = detective fiction, Jubilee Line = Kings, Queens, Princes and Princesses) etc.
When lockdown struck we were desperate to keep reading at the top of the children’s agenda, and so we continued to run challenges remotely, alongside weekly “ideas for reading” sent out in our Hazlegrove at Home Newsletter. Since we have been back “live” of course the library has been closed in order to preserve the sanctity of the year group bubbles. But we haven’t allowed that to stop us: our librarian has been visiting classes daily, taking orders and dropping off books, very much in the vein of a glamorous tea-lady. The children tell their tutor what they want to read, and lo and behold within an hour or two it is in their eager hands.
We have also run a new challenge: the “Great Chilli Challenge” where individuals and classes have been progressing from the mild bell pepper right up to the Carolina Reaper, converting words read into increasing chilli heat. Both these initiatives have had an amazing result: 100 million words read as a school. The average in a normal summer term, when we encourage as much outdoor time in our beautiful grounds, is 30 million.
Even in the long Christmas term we normally only read 150 million. With a library closed to pupils, we are amazed at the achievement of the pupils. Next term, when everything is back to normal (hopefully) we will continue with the library delivery system, reaching out to those pupils who simply do not get to the library often enough in their free time. Sometimes, it’s the simple things that work best. Our experience this term proves that you can take a horse to water AND make them drink.
It’s been so important to provide, through books, safe and exciting places for the children to travel to in their imaginations. When they are on the high seas with their fellow pirates, in their enchanted forest, on the clifftops with their smuggler friends, flying on a magic carpet over the roofs and minarets of an alien land, we have offered them relief, albeit temporary, from the drudgery of life in lockdown.
