At St. Mary and St. Chad First School we value the importance of reading. Not only as an aid to learning but also to promote reading for pleasure. Over the last few years, we have developed our reading scheme materials to include phonetically decodable books in a range of genres. 6 years ago, we invested thousands of pounds into developing the latter stages of our reading scheme, enabling us to create our ’Incredible Independence Readers’ section. Our reading results are a strength of the school.

In the past few years, a new and exciting range of reading material has become available, that would be super for our pupils to read. We know that you all value the importance of reading as much as we do and think that you would appreciate any opportunity help to improve the reading opportunities of our children. Therefore, to enable us to purchase some of these fabulous books and, as an incentive to further motivate children to read, the whole school will be taking part in a ‘Sponsored Read’.

During the dates of Monday 11th November – Sunday 24th November 2024, we would like your child to read and collect sponsors for doing so. Ideally, we would like your child to read every night but, if this is not possible, please try to read for as many nights as you can. Then, on the correct date, fill in all the reading that has been completed and then sign the box. For our very young children listening to a story being read to them is of equal importance as it will help secure a love of books and will expose them to vocabulary that they will be able to use in their spoken and eventually written worlds.

We would like all sponsored forms and money returned to school by Friday 29th November 2024. There will be rewards for all those who took part and any outstanding reading could win a class prize. We hope you will enjoy this activity whilst helping to raise money for the school.