‘Drop Everything And Read’ sessions encourage reading and literacy
‘Drop Everything And Read’ sessions encourage reading and literacy
To improve reading and literacy, we school run a variety of initiatives as part of our Communications Agenda. One of the highly successful activities we run is DEAR Time, which stands for ‘Drop Everything And Read’.
This is where the whole class take turns to read a text and they then discuss what they have read to highlight key vocabulary and share their thoughts on the issues raised in the material.
Due to how effective these literacy sessions are, we have now embedded them into the school timetable for students in Year 7, Year 8, Year 9, Year 10 and Year 12, so as many students in school can take part and benefit.
We run these sessions three times a year and all classes focus on a different subject area so if they normally have an art, history or maths lesson, their reading text can be relevant to art, history or maths. Topics change throughout the academic year and may include historical perspectives, careers, current reports or fiction, but ultimately will be interesting and enriching.
It was really especially impressive to see how enthusiastic our new Year 7 students were about wanting to get involved and read the text and how the whole class engages.