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Reading at Nightingale Home and Hospital Service

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At Nightingale, we believe that raising the profile of reading for pleasure significantly impacts young people's attainment, vocabulary, and comprehension. Evidence suggests that reading for pleasure (RfP) is more significant for educational success than any other factor. For this reason, our reading curriculum is formed around three important strands: 

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  • Independent reading time,

  • sharing stories aloud with students,

  • informal book recommendations.

 

Our Drop Everything And Read sessions allow students to choose reading material or books that are personal to them and have an interest. We have seen significant success with this approach, especially following our recent trip to Waterstones, where every student was given the opportunity to buy a book.

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Staff also share stories with children weekly. Reading aloud develops our reading community and enables staff to recommend books and authors to our young people. We also allow students to reflect on their books and share their stories with each other. This social time ensures students are exposed to a range of authors and peer recommendations that are vital to foster a love of reading. To underpin our initiatives, we offer rewards such as Give Me 5 and Teach Me for 10. We believe these combined approaches have changed students' attitudes toward reading and will have a far-reaching social and emotional impact later in life. 

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Why are we passionate about reading? The act of reading improves our communication skills and makes us better writers. We all need these skills in life and in our workplace.

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The times that we live in also mean screen time and social media have been shown to decrease focus and concentration. This is because people are so used to flicking between apps and scrolling through various websites. Reading can help counter this by providing one thing to focus on.

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Did you know that research shows children who read for pleasure achieve better, regardless of whether their reading material of choice is a novel or a magazine? Please encourage your child to read a variety of texts that they are interested in.

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Did you also know that research shows that a child who reads for 5 minutes a day will expose a child to around 400,000 words a year? Increasing that to 21 minutes exposes them to 1,823,000 words a year. 40 minutes results in 3,646,000 words a year.

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Please click the image below to read our guide which will assist you in understanding more about the benefits of reading.

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