I have thoroughly enjoyed walking around the school on Friday mornings to see all students following our reading expectations, which are aligned to the important literacy agenda at Bushey Meads School. All students were carefully following the selected age-appropriate texts using their bookmarks, listening silently to the adults in the room reading and contributing to meaningful discussions about the text to support knowledge building and comprehension skills. The purpose of this important reading initiative is to enhance students’ experiences of reading for pleasure and to expose students to challenging vocabulary that will support the development of richer lexicons. 

Our first fiction DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) event of this academic year was also a great success and continues to remind us that reading really does underpin academic success in all subjects at Bushey Meads School. The premise of DEAR is to ‘literally’ drop everything and read at a designated time and is designed to help students hone their concentration, widen their cultural capital and nurture reading for pleasure. Our next DEAR event will take place on Thursday 19th October and will have a non-fiction focus that is connected with the learning that will be taking place on this date.

Other literacy initiatives taking place at BMS:

• Word of the Week 
• Lexia tuition
• Reading mentoring
• That Reading Thing 
• Bedrock Vocabulary 
• Spellzone 
• World Book Day