Creating Readers and Critical Thinkers 

Reading is a chore for many children, tacked onto the end of the school day when they’re tired.  Reading aloud and stumbling over words, they barely get a sense of the story.

We all want our children to read. We know that reading is at the heart of good emotional intelligence and wellbeing, academic excellence, and better life chances.  We know that reading for pleasure is its own reward.  But by adding pressure around reading we often put our children off.

The Book Club Bunch Approach:

• At Book Club Bunch we read aloud to our book clubbers, picking a different book for each age group every term.
• We choose delectable books and we infuse life and breath into them. We choose literary texts, contemporary books, funny, serious and moving texts.
• For this job of bringing books to life, and unpacking their meaning, we employ professional actors who are also English scholars. They put on accents, exaggerate the funny bits, dramatize the moments of suspense, and nuance the meaning of trickier parts and new vocabulary.
• Between readings they lead the children in discussions. For younger readers, or children going at a slower pace, these discussions are around comprehension, inference and prediction. For older children, or those who are ready for more, we discuss rhetorical devices, the historical and political backdrop and wider-world relevance.
• By giving our children the very best experience of books and a place to decompress and explore, they become motivated, independent readers who love books; they become better at English; and they become skilled critical thinkers, confidently holding views and opinions of their own.

“The single most important activity…for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”

Jim Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook