Reading for nourishment: Insights from Jeffrey Boakye
5 February, 2025
Jeffrey Boakye is best known for his works that explore themes of identity, race, and social justice. His notable book, "Musical Truth: A Musical Journey Through Modern Black Britain," won the Accelerated Reader Quiz Writers' Choice Secondary Non-Fiction Award, highlighting his impact on readers and educators alike. Margaret Allen, Customer Advocacy Manager at Renaissance, interviewed Jeffrey on the benefits of reading and why our perspective on it needs to change.
Assessing Writing with Matt Beighton
15 January, 2025
Peer assessment relies on children being able to read and then comprehend their peer’s work. If you are pairing a child writing at a higher level with somebody at a lower level, there is a good chance that the lower-level child won’t be able to access the writing. It will have a reading level above where they are.
How to Spark a Love of Reading in Pupils
13 January, 2025
Recent reports show a worrying decline in pupils' reading habits. Our latest What Kids Are Reading Report found a 4.4% drop in the number of books read by over 1.2 million pupils across the UK and Ireland, from Year 1 to Year 11.
SATs Paper Analysis
13 January, 2025
Back in 2021, we first shared some analysis we’d completed in a post entitled ‘ATOS & SATs – the perfect match’, which looked at the reading ability children required to comprehend the questions posed in the papers. For almost every year since both SATs and GCSE papers were available, we have continued to complete this analysis, and it is always well received by our customers – even if the results can be surprising.
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun"
31 October, 2024
I have found during my years in the classroom, that poetry is one of the most effective ways of eliciting original and perceptive responses about a text with pupils. Take this Keats line for example, how many different mists are imagined in the room when discussing it with a class of thirty 14-year-olds? And what can we say about mist? Shrouding? Mysterious? Illuminating? Beautiful? A carefully curated collection of poetry that supports both the primary and secondary curriculum is now available with myON from Renaissance.
