Winter 2020 Newsletter
An update from us
This year has been a pretty unusual one for all of us as the pandemic has turned our lives on their heads and affected people in so many different ways.
At Ready Steady Read a major part of our activity is placing our volunteers in schools to provide one-to-one reading support to children. Although we’ve been unable to do this since the spring term, we have been busy, keeping in touch with the schools we work with to find ways that we can continue to work together to support children with their reading which has led to some new initiatives that you can read about below.
We’ve also continued to work with our brilliant partner, Smith + Nephew who have maintained their support throughout this difficult time.
We hope you’re all keeping well and we look forward to being able to return to the classroom as soon as it’s possible to do so, but until then, here’s a taster of what we’ve been up to this year.
We had a great start to the autumn term 2019 with 34 volunteers, including firefighters from Blue Watch at East Hull Fire Station, placed over 11 schools and providing support to over 800 children. Unfortunately, we had to stop going into schools in mid-March and haven’t been able to return due to distancing and safety restrictions in place in schools and to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our volunteers.
We had six new trained volunteers who were ready to start with us in the summer term. This would have enabled us to expand into schools on our waiting list and provide support to an additional 300 children.
At the end of the autumn term we had some excellent feedback through our surveys. Around 150 children completed them with 99% saying they enjoyed taking part in our reading programme and 87% saying that reading with one of our volunteers had improved their confidence in reading. In addition, 82% said that they were reading more independently and 71% said they now read more at home too. We also asked teachers for their feedback and some of the comments we received are below:
• Year 2 children have all moved up at least one reading band as a result of the reading scheme and work in class’ Collingwood Primary
• A real improvement in confidence this term’ Collingwood Primary
• We really appreciate a reading volunteer in school. It has a huge impact on the child’s confidence and the experience is really positive’ Thanet Primary
• Moved up a reading band, more confident and fluent’ Ainthorpe Primary
Our objectives as a charity are, amongst other things, to improve children’s literacy, boost reading ages and build confidence in reading to help children develop a lifelong love of reading – these results show that we are working in the right direction.
Smith+Nephew partnership
In our last newsletter, we gave you an update on our partnership with Smith+Nephew and how this had benefited Adelaide Primary School near their headquarters. We’re delighted that this partnership has continued and on 22 January this year we presented over 1000 new books funded by Smith+Nephew to Adelaide Primary. The books were presented at a full school assembly that was also attended by the Lord Mayor of Hull, Steve Wilson (image top right).
These amazing new books were used to create a new STEM section for the school library, replenish all class libraries, provide termly STEM book prizes for Adelaide’s Effort Award Scheme and weekly reading prizes.
More recently, we have presented over 500 new books each to Thanet Primary School (image middle right) and Woodland Primary School, both in East Hull. Again, these books were funded by Smith + Nephew and at least half were STEM related titles and are a huge boost to both schools’ STEM reading resources.
Unfortunately, we were unable to hold face to face presentations, but we did arrange virtual presentations with each of the schools’ literacy or science lead teacher, young reading or science ambassadors and representatives from Smith+Nephew. It was lovely to speak to the children and see their enjoyment from all the wonderful new books.
In addition to funding the purchase of new books, Smith+Nephew also ran a book collection for us and their fantastic staff donated approximately 1,400 books. These were shared between Adelaide Primary, Thanet Primary, Woodland Primary and another one of our schools, Collingwood Primary.
Smith+Nephew have also offered to continue their support of the schools by arranging visits by scientists and engineers to run workshops for the children, either virtually or in person when regulations allow.
We cannot thank Smith + Nephew enough for their incredible support in providing over 3000 books for some of our schools!
St Richards “Story a day” project
One of the schools we work with, St Richards Primary School, has developed a new “Story a day” initiative to encourage young readers to read a story each and every day. As part of this, the school planned to create a new lending library full of books that the children could take home and read with their families. To support the creation of this fabulous new library, we are delighted to have been able to provide over 1000 books (around 650 new books and approximately 400 ‘as good as new books’ kindly donated by Hymers College). In addition, we’ve also provided Ready Steady Read bean bags and Rumble the Elephant to decorate their new seating area.
To encourage children to participate in the programme and borrow books to read at home, we have worked with St Richards to devise a reward scheme with reading charts and reward prizes. The library was scheduled to open after school a couple of days a week to allow the children to visit with a family member to choose a book to take home and read.
The plan was to launch the lending library and reading reward scheme after the Easter holidays this year. Unfortunately, due to current COVID restrictions in schools the library is currently not open yet but will be opened as soon as it is safe to do so.
We think that once the lending library is operational it will be a great success and this is something we would like to expand into other schools in the future if we are able to secure funding.
Autumn term initiatives
As we have been unable to place our wonderful volunteers in schools this autumn term, we have developed two initiatives to continue to support children and schools with reading.
Reading Challenge
To encourage children to continue with their reading we created a simple reading reward scheme. Each child taking part had to read four books before the end of the Autumn term, receiving one of our Super Reader stickers for each book. On completion they received a Ready Steady Read Reading Reward Certificate and were also entered into prize draw to win a Ready Steady Read Christmas Hamper. Eight schools and just under 1,700 children took part with one prize per school, each school drawing the name of their winner out of a hat from all of those who completed the challenge.
Wheeler Primary School posted a lovely video on their Twitter account of one of their Year 3 students receiving their prize this week, which you can see here. If you do have access to Twitter and follow us @readysteadread, you will see lots of lovely and heart – warming messages and images from all our participating schools!
The feedback from our schools has been that our new reading challenge has been a great success and fits in exactly with their current focus of addressing the huge skill gap in reading caused by the COVID pandemic which has resulted in children being away from school for long periods of time. This being so, we plan to run the scheme again in the spring term and we hope to incorporate the reading challenge into the long term support we can offer schools, running the reading challenge alongside the one to one support provided by our amazing volunteers.
Christmas Book Giving
This Christmas, we wanted to work with our schools to help gift books to children who, despite enjoying or trying hard with their reading, do not have access to books at home or, for whom, the gift of a special book of their choice could really help them engage and develop a love of reading for pleasure.
This year, Steady Schoolwear has kindly sponsored two books per year group from reception to year 6 in each of our participating schools. The relevant class teachers nominated the children who they felt would benefit the most from the gift of a book for Christmas. The children were then asked which book they would like to receive. In total, we have been able to provide Christmas book gifts for over 130 children.
We would like to expand on this next year by asking local businesses for support so that we can provide Christmas book gifts for more children.
A massive thank you
This has been a challenging year for many people and businesses and we are so appreciative of those who have continued to support and work with Ready Steady Read, despite these challenges. We look forward to being able to resume face-to-face work in schools as soon as regulations allow and we know our volunteers are keen to return to one- to-one reading support. Until then, we’ll continue working with all of our partners to ensure that we’re able to continue to support schools and children in whatever ways we can.
We know many people won’t be able to enjoy the festivities the way they normally would, or how they’d like this year, but if you’re at a loose end or looking for something to do, we can heartilly recommend getting lost in a book!
Merry Christmas and happy new year,
Joanne Walker
Trust Chairman and Founder
Paula Stead
Trustee and Founder
