A cross-curricular approach to supporting reading progress and engagement

Support your pupils’ reading through an immersive, cross-curricular approach

High-quality texts can open up worlds of possibility in the primary classroom, providing a rich foundation for enquiry, creativity and meaningful links across subjects. This guide is designed to help teachers make the most of that potential by placing a high-quality book at the centre of classroom learning and using a cross-curricular approach to immerse children in that text.

How to use this resource

This guide is aimed at primary teachers and literacy leads. It includes information on the following areas:

• The benefits of a cross-curricular approach
• Advice on selecting texts
• A process for teachers to follow as they gather ideas and plan a sequence of lessons based around a text
• A mind map giving a range of cross-curricular text-based activity ideas (appendix 1)
• An example of a sequence of lessons based around the book Shackleton’s Journey by William Grill (appendix 2)

Whether you design an immersive week of activities rooted in a high-quality text or integrate the principles as part of your normal day-to day teaching, the guidance will support you to deepen your children’s understanding of a text, develop broader reading skills and foster motivation and engagement.