The EllisChurch Of England Primary School

‘Be The Best You Can Be’

We are always working hard and striving to promote a lifelong love of reading at The Ellis. As part of this, we are excited that we have purchased a variety of new and exciting books for your children to enjoy in class. 

We launched these books as part of our World Book Day celebrations and I think it is safe to say that our children at The Ellis enjoyed exploring a variety of new books including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. 

Each year group has their own set of 50 recommended reads to enjoy. These are all engaging, age-appropriate texts. We would like to share the list of books with you as you may be looking for book recommendations to share with your children at home. 

Recommended-Reads-Year-3-Poster

Recommended-Reads-Year-4-Poster

Recommended-Reads-Year-5-Poster

Recommended-Reads-Year-6-Poster

April 2024 Author Visit 

In April, we organised for poet Matt Goodfellow to visit The Ellis so that he could inspire our children with his fantastic poetry. Pupils at The Ellis enjoyed being ‘rebel writers’ for the day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How we teach Whole Class Guided Reading in KS1 & KS2

Supporting Reading At Home (KS1)

Supporting Reading At Home (KS2)

Click here for 100-books-to-read

Pyjamarama 1^st May 2020

To celebrate the bedtime story and reading together, many of our families got involved with this year’s BookTrust Pyjamarama festival of story-filled fun at home. Booktrust brought their Pyjamarama event forward to Friday 1 May 2020 to help keep families entertained and keep children reading during lockdown. Many of our pupils enjoyed staying in their pyjamas and reading with their families. Some of our pupils also made their own reading dens and created bookmarks and front covers. Mrs Hurding even treated us to a special read aloud session of Beegu by Alexis Deacon.  

 

The Ellis CE Primary Book Shop

Our Y6 Reading Champions run our Bookworms bookshop. The Reading Champions are in charge of ordering, pricing and selling the books to our pupils. Bookworms is open every lunchtime, you’ll also find Bookworms at our various reading events. Children can grab themselves a bargain with many books starting at just 50p!

 

Reading Raffle F2-Y6

How it works

To encourage and promote reading at home, we have implemented a reward system where each class has a reading owl (see image below). Our Reading Raffle Owls are greedy little creatures and like to be fed daily with raffle tickets.

The system works as follows:

1. When children have been caught reading they place a raffle ticket (with their initials and year group on) in the class jar.
2. Every Friday during our Gold Awards Assembly our Reading Champions pull a raffle ticket out of each jar, the winners win a bookmark.
3. The weeks worth of raffle tickets are then emptied into a larger box, at the end of each half-term we pull out three tickets and those children win a book of their choice.

 

How are children caught reading

Every time a child’s reading diary is signed then children can initial a ticket and feed the reading owl.

If children are caught reading during break times then they can initial a ticket and feed the reading owl.

Children may be caught reading to their peers.

Mystery Reader

Every Friday morning, we have a mystery reader in every class- right the way from F1 to Y6. At The Ellis we love to listen to stories, the teachers swap classrooms and we enjoy guessing who it might be.  Sometimes our mystery reader brings one of their favourite books (or even a new book that they’ve discovered and cant wait to share with us). Other times, throughout the week, we vote for the story that wed like to hear.  We love it when different teachers come to read to us, we especially enjoy joining in by adding actions and voices.

Summer Reading Festival 2019

What an amazing turnout we had the field was full of tents, books & of course people to share stories with! We would like to say a big thank you to all of our wonderful parents and carers who attended our Summer Reading Festival. At The Ellis CE Primary we love to make ourselves comfy and read! We enjoyed sharing books in the sunshine with our friends and family (we even treated ourselves to an ice cream).  

Autumn Reading Breakfast 2019

What a fantastic way to start the day!

We had another fantastic turnout at our Reading Breakfast, thank you to all who attended. Children (and adults) enjoyed tucking into a delicious breakfast and sharing books with their friends and families. I think I’ve even spotted some of our teachers including Mrs Hurding sharing stories with some of our superstar pupils! We already can’t wait for the next reading event.

Scholastic Half-Price Book Fair 2019

Thank you to everyone who came to our half-price book fair, we hope that you enjoy your new books. Look out for the next book fair in 2020!

World Book Day 2020

Dear Parents and Carers,

Thank you for helping to make World Book Day 2020 a huge success at The Ellis Primary. The children looked fantastic and all enjoyed sharing stories with their parents, teachers and peers.

Many of you have helped in so many ways, from attending our workshops and cafe, to visiting our book shop, spending up at the reading tombola, buying raffle tickets and donating baking.  It was lovely to see so many of our wonderful children diving into books.  A big thank you also to our amazing volunteers who make days like today happen.

We raised a total of 400! This money will go towards making reading the best it can be at The Ellis.

As you know, World Book Day isn’t a one off for us, we strive each and every day to create lifelong readers, therefore thank you for encouraging and supporting reading at home.

We look forward to seeing you at our next event.

Reading Assemblies

At The Ellis CE Primary we have been enjoying half termly Reading Assemblies since 2017. This is the perfect opportunity for our children to each bring a book and come together and share their love of reading (even Michael Rosen liked our Tweet about having a reading assembly!).

 

Reading Buddies At The Ellis

Reading buddies is a system in our school in which pupils of different ages read together. Each class has an allocated reading buddy class e.g. Y3 and Y6 are reading buddies.  Reading buddies meet up on a regular basis and read together, the older children often work as mentors supporting the younger children so that they can become fluent, lifelong readers. As you can see in the photos, children love finding comfortable places to read together (whether thats in our fabulous reading areas or under a table!).