Starting our reading journey
In the last year, Primary 5 from Tulliallan Primary School took part in the First Minister’s Reading Challenge for the first time. Now, we love reading books for fun and we read every day. Over the course of the school year, we used the Challenge to structure our literacy and writing work based around a class novel. Here is an overview of the books we explored as part of the Challenge:
Term 1
- Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers & Sam Winston
- The Right to Learn by Malala Yousafzai
- The Great Food Bank Heist by Onjali Q. Raul
- Know Your Rights or Have No Rights by Ananya Chopra
Term 2
- The Great Dream Robbery by Chris Smith & Greg James
- Climate Action by Georgina Stevens
- Hike by Pete Oswald
Term 3
- Bottled by Joe & Toe Brassington
- Leaf by Sandra Dieckmann
- The Last Bear by Hannah Gold
- The Invisible by Tom Percival
- Diary o’ a Wimpy Wean by Jeff Kinney
Term 4
- Rapunzel
- A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll
Our achievements with books
We won the First Minister’s Reading Challenge out of all the P5 entries in Scotland. We won by making a Thinglink (a digital interactive image) about all the activities we completed on reading. As a prize, we won a trophy and a £50 voucher for books. When we got the voucher, we used our budgeting skills to find out which bookshop to buy our books from. We bought a lot of books for different readers including a football book, a graphic novel, a mystery novel and a book written as a journal.
Why we got the award
We got the award because of all our work on books and because of how we managed to build reading into our daily routine. Every morning, we start by doing personal reading for about 10 or 20 minutes. Every pupil has their own personal reading book that they can choose out of our library. We also managed to find all the class a book they enjoyed even though a few weren’t very keen on reading at the start of the year. Our teacher loves reading too and she regularly recommended books to individuals or to the whole class. The learning we did was not just literacy work; we created artwork, videos and even a song and music video about brilliant books and amazing authors.
Recently, we had a visit from the Scottish Book Trust. Clare gave us some more books to add to our library including Fake, Noah Wild and The Floating Zoo.
We are so pleased we won the award and were able to buy books with our prize money because we are all book lovers now even if we weren’t at the start of the year.
Registration is now open for this year's Reading Challenge. Take part and see where your reading journey takes you!