Bookmark & Chatterstars: webinars to boost children's reading

We’re excited to announce four webinars in collaboration with Chatterstars, the vocab app, which will explore a host of ideas to boost children’s reading.

Teachers, families and volunteers, register your interest if, like us, you want to help develop a love of reading.

The four webinars are on super interesting topics, check them out here:

The Art of Reading

This session unpicks the ‘art’ involved in reading by considering ways we can add drama and energy to reading through drama techniques, the value of song and music and exploring prosody. Helen Prince, founder and CEO of ChatterStars, covers key elements of reading and gives practical tips about how to encourage a love of reading in young people and the potential benefits of different strategies, such as echo reading.

Reading Games

This webinar, led by ex-primary school teacher and Bookmark’s School Relationship Manager Lauren Whateley, looks at a range of reading games that can be played with children to foster a love of reading. We explore games that cover different areas of the National Curriculum and discuss how important it is to realise that reading comes in many different forms.

Building Fluency

This webinar explores all things related to fluency! We take a look at what the research tells us about fluency and why it is so important in developing children’s reading skills. The session demonstrates elements of fluency and ways to build children’s skills in each area through silly activities, research-based strategies and engaging games. We also look at some extracts that work well when developing children’s fluency.

Word Power

The final session in the Autumn webinar series looks at the importance of building children’s vocabulary and how to help them understand the nuance behind an author or poet’s language choice. It examines examples of language choices and gives ideas of how to explore these with children, as well as giving lots of ideas for vocabulary-building activities to make learning about words engaging and fun.