One of the most pleasurable ways of spending time with children is time spent sharing books. It may be Orange Pear Apple Bear over and over again, Mo Willems’ Elephant and Piggie series, joyously sharing the dialogue, or the complexities of The Imaginary, Clockwork, Skellig or Gleitzman’s, Once that sends Year 6 children scurrying to read all the rest of that series of novels. When we read together we deepen the experience of reading and we feed the writer.
There is, in Norfolk, a school where, once a week, the whole school is reading together. There was. I imagine it still happens. It was started by its remarkable English lead, first in her own Upper Key Stage 2 class, then for all Key Stage 2 and later, through the whole school. For one morning a week, children, in small groups, guided by an adult, read novels and picture books. The school is lucky enough to be able to recruit enough additional volunteers to make sure the groups are small and that children have time to savour what they are reading. That slow tasting and appreciating each text is important. The quietness that falls on the school as children enter the world of books is, in itself, something to be savoured.
Ten years ago, in the school where I am a governor, we introduced a similar thing. Not the whole school reading at once, but the reading of a series of novels in small groups. If they read nothing else, by the time they leave primary school, these children will have experienced close encounters with up to fifty novels. We call it guided reading, but, now, having experienced it myself for all these years, I would prefer to call it close reading. The guidance is there but the guidance is two way. The adult brings their experience of reading and of texts and the children bring their own ways of looking, their own preoccupations and questions. Each time I read a novel with a group, I discover it anew. Each group and each child within it takes something different from the reading. And what I noticed, very early in my experience of this kind of group, was that not only did children love the reading, they linked it to their understandings of writing.
We know that reading nourishes the writer. ‘When still a child,’ says Zadie Smith, ‘make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.’ When reading in small groups we can make it possible for young readers to make the reading their own and, at the same time, let them experience, discover, something about how writers, how writing can work.