Summer Reading Challenge
The national curriculum for English aims to ensure that pupils develop the habit of reading widely and often for both pleasure and information.
The Summer Reading Challenge is the UK’s biggest annual reading promotion for children aged 4 to 11. Last year in Manchester over 11,000 children joined the Challenge. This year it launches on 2 July and runs throughout the summer until 8 September.
The Summer Reading Challenge combines FREE access to books with fun, creative activities in the library during the summer holidays. Throughout the Challenge, library staff and young volunteers support the children, helping them to discover new authors and illustrators and to explore a wide range of different types of books and ways of reading.
The Challenge is a key element of the Read Manchester programme, and an opportunity for Manchester schools to encourage reading for pleasure and develop links with their local library.
How the Challenge works
- Children sign up at their local library and receive a Mischief Makers collector poster
- Children borrow and read at least six library books of their own choice during the summer, collecting special stickers to complete their folder and incentives along the way
- Library staff and young volunteers are on hand to advise and run family-friendly activities
- Children who complete the Summer Reading Challenge are presented with a certificate and a medal
How do schools benefit?
- The Summer Reading Challenge is intrinsically inclusive and can contribute to the achievement of ALL your pupils including those with special educational needs, disadvantaged pupils and the most able
- It enhances and supports your school’s reading policy and your mission for all children to read more widely and for pleasure
- It encourages parental engagement and family involvement in reading and helps your school make links with the library and the wider community
- It allows children to become more independent in their reading when choosing books and encourages using imagination and empathy to explore a text beyond the page
- It takes place at your local library and is a brilliant opportunity for extra-curricular activity
- It helps prevent the tendency for children’s reading to dip over the holidays and supports the successful transition between year groups and stages
Free places available at our launch events
There are a series of launch events taking place across libraries in late June/early July. We are especially keen to offer these to schools who have not yet visited a library this academic year, but welcome interest from all schools!
Please get in touch Cheryl Pridgeon or Margaret Duff if you would like to be involved.
School competition
Your school could win a day with Bafta award winning screen writer and author/illustrator of over thirty five children’s books, Ciaran Murtagh. There are also two runner-up prizes of a Summer Reading Challenge book collection for your school. Encourage your children to join the Challenge, and when they read all 6 books they will be entered into the prize draw. The schools with the highest number of children (proportionate to pupil roll) completing the Challenge will be the winners.