ANOTHER busy year for the English department as we try to ensure our students not only engage with the curriculum, but also appreciate how much fun –and how rewarding – the study of English can be.

An important new development this year was the introduction of the Accelerated Reader initiative for all year sevens. Run as a joint enterprise between the English department and the library, it was expected that the beneficial effects of Accelerated Reading would help students in every subject across the curriculum.

At the end of this academic year, each student had read, on average, 15 more books than they had read the previous year. Mrs Jones, the then librarian, was extremely impressed.

The students spent at least one hour every week in the library reading their books and, as they finished each book, they took an on-line interactive quiz testing their understanding of what they had read.

“We did have some reluctant readers at the beginning,” admitted Mrs Jones, “but it really wasn’t very long before they were all engrossed in their books. It’s not that children don’t like reading – it’s just that few of them have the opportunity to sit down and lose themselves in a story. Once they do, they’re hooked! The fact that over 2,800 more books were lent out than in previous years shows how successful this has been.”

Mrs Grantham, head of English, is equally delighted at the success of the enterprise.

“Reading for pleasure is the best way of improving literacy, and every subject –not just English – demands literacy skills. Already, teachers of other subjects are reporting that their year seven students are showing greater engagement with their lessons.”

From September the Accelerated Reader initiative is being extended to include year eight. If it continues to show such great benefits it could even be extended to include Key Stage 3 students.

As part of the celebrations for the Worcestershire Teen Book Award, we took two teams to Stourport High School for a Book Quiz. There were six teams in all, from four Schools – Droitwich High, Woodrush Community High School, Stourport High School and Wolverley. Students had to answer questions on each of the six shortlisted books. Wolverley Team Extreme were third and Wolverley Legends tied in first place with Droitwich.

A tie- breaker round on the authors was the decider and Wolverley Legends won by 3 points. Congratulations to Team Extreme – Caitlin Jolly, Tom Wynne-Jones, Molly Parmenter and Ben Stanley and to Wolverley Legends – Jodie Fox, Megan Handy, Rhianon Jacobs and Dan Woolley.

As part of an initiative to challenge and stretch gifted and talented students, selected students from St Catherine’s came up to Wolverley two evenings a week for three weeks where they spent an hour creating a magazine. The magazine is aimed at the students entering year seven in September and the students decided to name it Seventh Heaven!

Each evening, the students worked with an English teacher writing articles, creating advertisements, designing a front cover and making up horoscopes. The result is a professional-looking magazine which was distributed to all year sevens. The students worked hard and really enjoyed the work. Alex, from St Catherine’s, especially enjoyed the fact that the students themselves decided what should go into the magazine.

“Making decisions about the content of the magazine really made us all feel quite grown up and responsible”, she said. Jamie from St Catherine’s, added: “The teachers helped us if we asked them to, but we did all the work ourselves.”

In November last year the English department organised a trip to Birmingham for the annual GCSE Poetry Conference. Year 11 and members of the year ten English Express Group were able to hear the poets they study for their English and English Literature GCSEs not only reading their poems but explaining the inspiration behind them and answering questions. The students were delighted with the experience.

As part of our Specialist Schools budget, year nines were treated to a production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet by a travelling theatre company from Stratford. As all the students were studying this play for their end of year exams, they found it particularly useful.

“Not all of our students have the opportunity to experience live theatre, and it really adds to the appreciation of any play to actually see it in performance,” explained Mrs. Grantham. The workshop which followed the performance also gave the students a chance to find out more about the intricacies of staging a live performance.

All year sevens received their free books on the Booked Up scheme in September. This will happen again next month.

Mrs Jones liaised with the history department and took a group of students to see Morris Gleitzman at Droitwich Spa High School. He is a famous Australian author – he wrote Two Weeks with the Queen – and was promoting his books about a Jewish boy in Poland during the second world war, to tie in with Holocaust commemorations.

Mrs Jones also took a group of students to Stourport High to hear Jonathan Stroud, author of the Bartimaus trilogy, talk about his book Heroes of the Valley. Both groups of students thoroughly enjoyed listening to the authors and had the opportunity to question them about their writing styles.

On November 3 this year, Andy Briggs, the renowned film screenwriter, graphic novelist and author of Heroes.com and Villains.com is coming to Wolverley to give talks and run workshops with year seven and Sixth Form. As you can see, at Wolverley we go all out to encourage our budding writers!