Stories, Daniel Willingham tells us, are cognitively privileged. We all pay special attention to stories. For hundreds and thousands of years before there was written language, we communicated our knowledge, our culture and our norms for community and belonging through stories, sitting around fires. People who listened and learned thrived. People who didn’t were less likely to. We learned and probably evolved to pay attention when a story was told. We also probably learned that sharing stories was how we built an ‘us.’ Shared stories are critical to our belonging.
At Hartshill Academy, we read aloud in reading lessons. This is a strategy that works in two ways.
Firstly, through exposure to texts that pupils would not have necessarily chosen before, pupils can be exposed to new vocabulary, syntactic structures and cultural knowledge that they may not ordinarily have been exposed to.
Secondly, reading aloud can significantly help those pupils who struggle to decode words on their own and do not have the fluency required to be able to make sense and comprehend what they are reading.
In Years 7, 8 and 9, pupils have one designated lesson each week for reading. In this time, pupils read, with their teachers, a book from Hartshill Academy’s Reading Canon. All books are suitable for the pupils’ age groups and have been carefully chosen to match need, broaden horizons and develop reading ability.