The Ultimate Character Champion Battle: oracy activity inspired by reading for pleasure

At the National Literacy Trust we know that young people’s engagement and enjoyment of reading is at crisis point. In 2024 our research, exploring focused questions with over 75,000 children and young people aged 5 to 18, found that just 1 in 3 (34.6%) said that they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2024. We are dedicated to finding inspiring ways to bring the enjoyment of reading back into the minds of our young people. Making reading and book talk collaborative, active and engaging is part of this approach.

What is the Ultimate Character Champion Battle?

This oracy-based classroom resource encourages your pupils to explore the characters they enjoy reading about the most in a way that encourages creativity in their discussion and presentational talk. This resource aims to bring reading for pleasure into the classroom, explore it practically, and be inspired to find out more about the characters their peers have shared. Whether their favourite character is factual or fictional, human or anthropomorphic, this resource will build their discussion and persuasive talk skills using what they already know to inform, prepare, plan, and present their character for battle (with an added element of competition thrown in too).

How to use these resources

Each age-based guide provides teachers with a step-by-step lesson plan leading pupils towards a presentation final activity.

Separate guides are provided for ages 5 to 7 (KS1/P1 to P4), 7 to 11 (KS2/P4 to P7), and 11 to 14 (KS3/S1 to S3) which include all you need to host an in-class character champion battle. The guides also include suggestions for how these ideas could be explored outside of the classroom. Each resource provides links for UK curricula, and has a character battle planner example and temlate worksheet in the appendix.