Favourite Five Books

In Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 we have 5 favourite books which read over and over again in order to develop children's engagement and love of books, vocabulary, and their understanding, comprehension and excitement!

By sharing these books multiple times, children become secure with the vocabulary , hearing new vocabulary again and again helps them commit the meaning of new words into their long term memory. Re-reading stories to children can deepen the children’s familiarity with a story and increase their emotional engagement. Additionally, children have new opportunities to connect with characters and their feelings and to relive the excitement and emotions of stories. We are striving to build a love of books! 

Book Talk developing understanding, comprehension and excitement 

Carefully selected questions are targeted to help develop oral comprehension skills, an area our children are working on in all year groups. Our children benefit from becoming familiar with the text structure and layout when reading books multiple times of the 5 books they prefer and why; they compare favourite five books to other books they’ve read that are similar and they start to learn repetitive phrases off by heart. It builds excitement about reading and sharing books together and encourages book talk: children talk to each other about which start to talk about authors they enjoy.

Do we only read Favourite Five books?
No! We continue to read other books from the Hayward’s Reading Spine, library books and books from home, but we focus on sharing the Favourite Five again and again.