Brush up your Ray Winstone menacing whisper

Jon Biddle, English lead and NEU rep at Moorlands Primary in Norfolk,

THERE’S so much about being in the classroom that I love – as well as quite a lot that makes me seriously think about how much longer I want to be in teaching. But the part of the day I generally look forward to most is our class storytime or read-aloud session.

School timetables are under increasing pressure but, for me, read-aloud time is one part of the day that cannot be dropped. It provides too many benefits.

A class of children enjoying the same story has a bigger impact on building a class reading community than virtually anything else. It allows them to develop a knowledge of characters, plots and story structures, as well as providing opportunities to make predictions and links to other stories. It provides commonality among members of the class who may lead very different lives. It’s also the only time during a day that some pupils will have the chance to listen to a story being read aloud and interact with an adult who enjoys reading.

Give storytime the respect it deserves

Several factors have a direct influence on the success of storytime. One of the most important is when it takes place. Traditionally, it is often squeezed in at the end of the afternoon and is regularly interrupted by a couple of students wandering off to collect the packed lunch trolleys or a message arriving from the office. We have moved ours to earlier in the day. Some classes read together straight after lunch and some at a convenient point during the morning session, but it is always given priority.

Choosing the right book is essential. There are several modern classics that I am confident will always be successful, including The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo, Varjak Paw by SF Said and Cloud Busting by Malorie Blackman. However, it is a great idea to hand the choice of text over to the class, by taking on board their recommendations or picking up on what is currently ‘hot’ in the classroom. Over the past year we have read A Street Dog Named Pup by Gill Lewis because it was suggested by a pupil who loved it and organised a petition to make it our next book, and Ways to Be Me by Libby Scott and Rebecca Westcott because it won a landslide majority in a class vote.

The more enthusiastic an adult is when reading aloud and the more of an event it becomes, the more the children get caught up in the excitement. We often have a flickering fire on the whiteboard behind the reader, with the pupils curled up on cushions or beanbags on the floor.

Thinking in advance about the voices of the characters also helps. I remember the first time I read The Outlaw Varjak Paw to a class and Omar, one of the Orrible Twins, arrived on the scene. Because he was tough and streetwise, I decided to make him sound a bit like Ray Winstone after a big night out. I had totally forgotten that a few paragraphs later, Ozzie, his much bigger and tougher twin brother, appeared. There was nowhere for me to go with his voice apart from to try and pull off an even more gravelly version.

Like most teachers, I tend to rely on about four voices: my regular voice for the main character, an arch-villain who, for some inexplicable reason, permanently speaks in a menacing whisper, a 95-year-old granny and an even more chirpy version of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins.

Finally, leave the story on a cliffhanger, every single time. The collective groan as the book closes and the children realise they have to wait until tomorrow to find out what happens next is one of my favourite classroom moments. It means they are emotionally engaged and are living the story through their imaginations. It means they are going to talk about the book with their friends and seek out similar stories. Just as importantly, for some, it means that they know there is something to look forward to tomorrow and the value of that is incalculable.

@jonnybid

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