Staff Meeting Showcase: The Wide Reading Program’s Book Talks Activity

This week I had the opportunity to showcase the Wide Reading Program at a whole school staff meeting. It’s always nerve-wracking presenting to a group of tired staff who’d rather be using the time to complete their impending reports or mark their pile of exam papers! My first instinct was to cry a firm “hell no!” at my Head Teacher when he asked, but after a moment’s thought I realised what a huge advocacy opportunity I’d be throwing away if I did.

So, heart thumping, I accepted.

I kept it short and sweet, choosing to highlight the aims of the program and the ‘positive primer’ Book Talk I use with each class.

This simple starter activity aims to help normalise and model reading behaviours, encourage a social element to what is often perceived as an isolated activity, and build motivation through peer recommendations. It’s super easy to run, requiring only the teacher asking “what are you reading at the moment?” and prompting further discussion from student and staff responses. Some classes with fewer readers might only take 5 minutes to complete a Book Talk, but others with more students wanting to participate can take up to 15 to 20 minutes! I love seeing the variety of things the kids are interested in reading, and encourage their classroom teachers to participate in the discussion too. It’s always interesting seeing what different things people are reading!

As far as I could tell, my presentation seemed to go well. I feared that when I asked the golden question “what are you reading at the moment?” I’d be met with a room full of crickets, but luckily several staff jumped on board with the chance to share their most recent reads with the group. I didn’t want to take up a huge amount of time with this discussion so I ended it after three volunteers shared their experiences, but I reckon we could have easily spent the rest of the staff meeting talking about books if we’d had the time!

And speaking in front of my colleagues, as terrifying as it was, not only allowed me to increase the visibility of the work I do to support our students’ developing literacy skills and reader identities, but let me showcase my professionalism and the research behind my work. The rewards were immediate: straight after my presentation, the Deputy of Inclusion and Support emailed me to request that the Support Unit classes are involved in the program next year. From humble beginnings supporting only two classes in 2022 and three classes in 2023, the Wide Reading Program will soon benefit all eleven Stage 4 classes as well as the seven (or more) Support Unit classes.

Methinks 2026 is going to be a very busy year in the library!

CBCA Book Week 2025: Taking Our School On An Adventure!

The end of Term 3 is always a hectic time, with assessments, exams, reports, year 12 graduation, and other end of term extra-curricular happenings, so it’s no surprise that my post for our 2025 Book Week celebrations has been sitting in my drafts for over a month!

This year was only my second year running Book Week activities and, similar to last year, I ran a couple of competitions aiming to boost the visibility of reading for fun alongside some activities in my Wide Reading Program. The 2025 theme was Book an Adventure, which provided a lot of fodder for creativity amongst my students and colleagues!

Wide Reading Program

Last year I did a word cloud activity, but this year I planned ahead and bought a couple of book packs for the CBCA’s shortlisted titles in the Picture Books and Older Readers categories. Using these books, I was able to send my students on a Blind Date with a Book.

This activity was supported by the PowerPoint above along with the worksheet below to help students organise their thoughts about each book. Students rotated through a few books in the course of the lesson and at the end we discussed what they thought about each text and which were their favourites. Our Book Week was held a week after the official event, so the winners for each category had already been announced. I therefore asked each class which book they thought was the winner in each category; interestingly, while a few successfully identified The Truck Cat as the winner for the Picture Book category, no class picked the winner from the Older Readers books!

Overall, I feel like this was a fairly successful activity, though it did require a few tweaks to work for different classes. A number of the Older Readers books ended up being borrowed and having a few reservations placed for them, indicating that there was a bit of interest in these titles from our students.

Door Decorating Competition

Our most visible Book Week activity is our Door Decorating Competition. Last year our Office Staff had a controversial win, and this year the competition was intense between a number of different faculties who were intent on taking on the top honours.

Our Office Staff this year did a fully interactive, multi-day spectacular where they dressed as flight attendants and made in-flight announcements at the start of each period. The English staff were inspired by The Wizard of Oz and decorated every door in their block to take students on an adventure through the story. However, the HSIE faculty were the winners at the end of the day with their immersive Jurassic Park experience, complete with printed book chapters, dino-paws, music and lollies for our student judges. They even let the dinosaurs loose on the playground! Such chaos!

Cosplay Competition

Without a doubt, the highlight of our Book Week celebrations for the students is our Cosplay Competition. I was once again able to organise it as a mufti day, with all funds raised going towards the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. This year our winning cosplayers were a group of mischief-making Gryffindors whose magical performance involved a floating feather and wowed the crowd.

It was wonderful throughout the week to see such enthusiastic discussion around books and reading. Our various activities also give me an opportunity to showcase the library’s value to our school community. Book Week tends to be viewed as a more primary activity, but I highly recommend High School TLs give it a go too! There’s so much potential value that it can add to our work and gives our students and colleagues a chance to celebrate the wonder of picking up a book.

Wide Reading Program: Buddy Reads Activity

As any teacher can tell you, teenagers are inherently social beings. They’ll also tell you that, for so many reasons, for the most part teens also don’t want to read for pleasure.

Last year I attended ALIA’s online webinar Fostering A Passion For Reading, and Karen Eyre’s brilliant session focused on how reading needs to be more social to overcome the reasons behind adolescent aliteracy. She discussed her ‘read with a mate’ program, where she often pairs students with their friends so they can take turns reading to one another.

This week I decided to adapt her activity and tested out my newly formed ‘buddy reads’ activity. I changed the activity slightly, so that instead of working in pairs students on novels could work in larger groups with picture books. They could either take it in turns to read to one another or designate one ‘teacher’ who would read to the rest. By doing this I was hoping to hook some of our more social and performative students while tapping into their nostalgia for being read to as children in their primary classes.

I had some doubts about how focused the groups would be, but to my surprise and delight they did a fantastic job of staying on task and really engaged with their reading! Many of the usually disengaged boys combined into one big group, which initially drew my attention and concern, but I needn’t have worried. Two boys took it in turns to read to the others and did wonderful work displaying prosody and discussing the visual elements of the books. Their listeners were rapt, and another less condfident boy even picked up a book and wanted to have a go reading to the others because he saw it modeled by his mates!

Some of our more shy students elected to read independently, but for the students who chose to engage with the buddy reads activity I found it a remarkable testament to the power of social reading. The feedback from the class was positive, with an overwhelming majority wanting to do something similar again in future. I think in future lessons I’ll gradually increase the length and complexity of the text types, and gradually reduce the number of people in the groups to allow for deeper examination of their reading materials.

Added bonus: it gives me a chance to advocate for our library on social media!

https://www.instagram.com/p/DHCzCz5M385

Welcome Back for 2025!

The start of the school year is always hectic, and 2025 has been no different!

This year I’ve got 11 classes from year 7, 8, 9 and our Support Unit participating in the Wide Reading Program, which is super exciting. The first lesson of the year is always an orientation to introduce our resources and services.

For our new year 7 classes I go through a Canva presentation with them, followed by a Scavenger Hunt activity designed to familiarise them with our different collections. This year I’m also using these activities to emphasise “shelf-care”, or proper treatment of the resources on the shelves. So far the feedback from students has been positive, with some students choosing to borrow books from the collections that they’ve been exploring. This orientation is split across two lessons, with the first introducing the library’s physical resources and the second introducing the library’s digital resources.

For the year 8 classes, most students have participated in the program last year so already have an idea about the resources and services we provide. I therefore run a revision Kahoot, which the kids always love!

Having the students participate in these lessons has proved to be such a great way to familiarise them with our library, which has in turn translated to increased patronage and loans. Over the last two weeks we’ve loaned 220 books to students and each book in the hands of a student represents an opportunity to improve their literacy and wellbeing!

Introducing the Wide Reading Program to Students

Last week I posted about the structure of the Wide Reading Program I’ve been trialling for the past few years. This week I thought might be useful to give a bit more detail about how I introduce the program to students.

Activity 1: Brainstorm and Discuss the Benefits of Reading

As we all know, if we simply tell a teenager to do something they’re probably not going to follow our instructions. I’m therefore a big believer in trying to get our students to understand the reasons why we learn certain things, and this is where I start with the Wide Reading Program. In previous years I’ve relied on a class brainstorm and discussion of the benefits of reading for pleasure, but this year I rejigged things to include a Canva presentation which sets things out for my students more explicitly.

This year I found that during the brainstorm and discussion most students were able to easily identify the literacy benefits to reading for pleasure while some said it helped them to learn about things or to relax or escape from their problems. However, I found that very few students recognised the wellbeing benefits. In particular I focus on the idea of reading as developing our ability to empathise with others, since this is inherently relevant to the teen experience. Hopefully seeing the visual in the presentation helped them to recognise the multitude of ways reading can help them in their everyday lives.

My reading lessons are only an hour long, and this year due to the excellent discussion sparked by the Canva visual I found that I didn’t really get to the second and third discussion points regarding why they read or don’t read and what behaviours they count as reading – these ended up being incorporated into subsequent lessons. Next year I’ll likely remove them completely from the lesson to streamline my teaching activities.

Activity 2: Reader Identity Survey

Instead, my priority was to get students to complete the reading habits survey so I could get a better understanding of who they are as readers and how I can best support their reading journey. The first two questions in this survey are based around their reader identity and confidence:

  1. I think I am:
    • A confident reader
    • An OK reader
    • Not a very confident reader
  2. I am:
    • Someone who loves reading
    • Someone who will read if there’s nothing else to do
    • Someone who doesn’t like reading

I’ve previously examined their this year’s results, with most students identifying themselves as OK readers who aren’t that enthusiastic about doing it for fun which is consistent with the research in this area. However, after attending a recent webinar by ALIA on Fostering a Passion for Reading, next year I’ll reword the second question to something like “I really don’t like reading but wish I was better at it” to promote a growth rather than fixed mindset.

The second part of the survey asks students about their reading preferences:

However, this is an indecipherable wall of text for struggling readers and rather difficult to navigate on the devices we used. This screenshot is only capturing half of the options I’ve given them! Next year I’ll therefore either simplify this or remove it; I did actually remove it for our streamed Literacy class and found it worked much better. I originally included it with the intention of using it to find specific books for each student but due to time restraints I haven’t had the opportunity to do this yet and doubt I will find the time in future years.

The third section of the survey is a bit more open-ended and could easily replace this second section to help me get a better idea of who my readers are. It features 3 questions:

  1. What was the last book you remember reading? What did you think of it?
  2. What was the best book you have ever read? Why?
  3. What is your reading goal for 2024? e.g. would you like to read a certain number of books, a certain style of books, books from a specific author or culture etc.?

In future I’d love to work with the classroom teacher to nominate three students each per term to target based on these goals. While this won’t allow us to reach everyone in the class, it will allow us to focus on the kids who might otherwise slip through the cracks.

So there you have it – my first lesson in the Wide Reading Program. If anyone has suggestions on how else I can improve or activities that have worked for you, please leave a comment below! If you’re enjoying these activities, stay tuned for more in coming weeks.