teachers: learning together, involving parents - and pugs!

Sometimes you meet a teacher who's really on fire about reading. When I met Year 4 teacher Claire Williams at a UKLA conference and she sounded enthusiastic about using Pugs of the Frozen North with her class, I never knew just HOW much she was going to run with it. We stayed in touch, and she advised me on how to put together book-themed challenges for classes. And then she went away and did a whole project with parents, showing how when parents and kids work together on book-related projects, it really fires up the kids!



If you're working with kids, definitely read Claire's report - with lots of photos - about how she used Pugs of the Frozen North together with parents and children: click here for the PDF.




Here's someone helping her kid make a personalised sled for a 'Race to the Top of the World' display around the classroom. Claire's project encourages 'Reading for Pleasure', the idea that if we let children enjoy reading fun stuff and don't always treat it as an arduous educational exercise that puts them off, children get hooked on reading as something enjoyable, and are much more likely to read throughout their lives. Claire emphasises the importance of relationships in reading, and how parental involvement really helps.



You can download the fun Pugs of the Frozen North classroom creative challenges that Claire and I put together here on my website!



I was quite moved by what Claire shared! She wrote,

Our ‘Race to the Top of the World’ topic came to an end the week before half term in October. I was absolutely blown away on the first day of the spring term, almost three months later, when children in my class came running up to me on the playground to show me the copies of Pugs of the Frozen North – and Philip and Sarah’s other books – that had been in their stockings. Comments from parents in Reading Records showed that the children and parents had enjoyed reading these books together during the Christmas holiday and this continued into the spring term. There were also comments about the impact parents had seen on their children’s enjoyment of and motivation to read.

Thank you, Claire!

And here's the Open University website that hosted Claire's research project, Research Rich Pedagogies. The overall project is called Teachers as Readers: Building Communities of Readers, and emphasises the importance of teachers' knowledge of children's literature.



If you're on Twitter, you can follow Claire Williams and get inspired at @_borntosparkle, my co-author Philip Reeve at @philipreeve1 and Open University Reading for Pleasure at @OpenUni_RfP.