Dear Parents/Carers,

As we are passionate about maintaining the progress that your children are making with their reading and encouraging reading for pleasure, we thought it would be helpful to point you in the direction of some reading activities and resources that will prove useful during remote learning.

With children at home looking for new kinds of entertainment, lockdown seems like the perfect opportunity to get more children reading for pleasure. In school, we encourage the children to read wide range of both fiction and non-fiction and in a variety of ways e.g. books, magazines and newspapers and we would love you to do the same at home. The ideas below will hopefully provide you some guidance and support to help support your children’s reading whilst also making it a fun experience for all of you involved!

• Use the ‘Oxford Owl’ reading site which is a free eBook library for 3 to 11-year-old and a hub of educational games and activities. This will allow children access to the reading schemes that they read at school and can be filtered by age group, text type, book band, phonics phase or reading level.
• Listen to an Audiobook – Audible is available to all children for as long as schools are closed. Children everywhere can instantly stream an incredible collection of stories. All stories are free to stream on your desktop, laptop, phone or tablet. ‘Elevenses’ with David Walliams is also a personal favourite: https://www.worldofdavidwalliams.com/elevenses/
• BorrowBox is a great app that allows you to access books from your library during this lockdown. To sign up, follow the link below: https://www.borrowbox.com/
• The Winter Reading Library Challenge has been launched! This year, the Public Libraries’ Winter Reading Challenge is all about getting cosy together to share the love of reading. It kicked off on Monday 11^th January and runs for six weeks, until the end of the spring half-term - by Saturday 27th February. The children need to read or listen to any four books to complete the challenge. This includes books they read or listen to for school, with family members and friends over Zoom, bedtime stories, non-fiction books, eBooks and audiobooks. Those who take part online will automatically be sent a certificate when they complete the challenge, but the most important thing is that your child enjoys some winter reading for pleasure. To take part, you will need to sign up using the link below: https://www.hants.gov.uk/librariesandarchives/kids-zone
• First News (an online newspaper for children) are offering free access to their weekly paper for a limited period of time. To access the latest issue, you just need to simply enter your email address using the link below: https://subscribe.firstnews.co.uk/free-downloadable-issue/
• Make the most of books especially written for this time - there's no doubt that we find ourselves in the most unusual of times and in response, a small number of specially produced books have been created during this time for free reading online. ­The Book of Hopes in particular is a collection of short stories, poems and essays from famous children’s writers and illustrations. You can read it for free by clicking on the link below: https://literacytrust.org.uk/family-zone/9-12/book-hopes/

We hope that these resources prove useful during this time. Happy reading!