Literacy
At The Corsham School, we are committed to developing vital literacy skills such as reading, writing, speaking and listening. These skills are essential for students to thrive both at school and beyond. In all subjects, teachers model and encourage high levels of literacy, while ensuring that students are explicitly taught sophisticated subject-specific vocabulary while being exposed to a range of academic texts.
We believe that reading is the key to unlocking the curriculum and have focused on promoting this with our ambitious tutor reading programme ‘Corsham Reads’ and various whole school reading events.
Please click here to see the encouraging literacy at home handouts.
Why reading?
Extensive research shows that improving student’s literacy levels can have the single biggest influence on their success and outcomes, both academically and in later life. For example, a student who reads for 20 minutes a day is 90% more likely to score higher on standardised tests than peers. Furthermore, reading develops personal qualities such as empathy, improved well-being and offers insight into a range of different worlds, cultures and perspectives.
Corsham Reads
In 2021 we launched our biggest and most ambitious reading project: ‘Corsham Reads’. This involves tutors reading aloud to their tutor group for two tutor sessions a week. We have carefully curated a diverse range of books selected as they are challenging, rich in vocabulary and thought-provoking. Each student has their own copy of the book so that they can follow along, enjoy the story and share the positive collective experience of reading. Tutors model the skill of reading fluently and with passion; this allows students to discover a wealth of texts that they might not otherwise access and we hope this will ignite a joy of reading beyond the classroom too.