Read Manchester have kindly donated 12,000 copies of Marcus Rashford’s You are a Champion: How to Be the Best You Can Be to children across Manchester. This book campaign is supported by One Education and Manchester Libraries as we hope it will create a significant impact on the lives of children, both as readers and in terms of their wellbeing and mental health.
Copies of the book are being given out to Manchester LA schools. Teachers can find out more about how to apply on the School Hub or alternatively, contact cheryl.pridgeon@manchester.gov.uk for more information.
Children in Manchester will receive their own copy of You are a Champion. The books are intended to go home with either the Y5 or Y6 children (school’s choice), though you may want to use One Education’s teaching plans and resources before the books are sent home to encourage further engagement with the text once the children take it home.
As many of you know, encouraging reading outside of school is of paramount importance for so many reasons that we couldn’t list them all here. The more children read the more they: develop reading skills, improve mental health, increase knowledge and vocabulary, develop communication, imagination, concentration, along with having the opportunity to see themselves within books and learn about the lives of others!
We hope that, with your help, this campaign will further promote the importance of reading to our children and families across Manchester.
Planning and Resources
The teachers’ resource packs include planning and resources for: Curriculum, Reading Skills and Writing – all of which use You are a Champion as a stimulus. The plans can be used in their entirety (over a week’s worth of learning) or you can select the parts that are most pertinent to your cohort of children.
Children’s resource packs have also been created for use alongside You are a Champion for when it is taken home. These resources have been designed to be used on screen or to be printed out and used as paper copies. There is a bookmark for each child which can be taken home when the books are sent home. On the bookmark is a link to the resources so that children can access them at home. It may be beneficial for you to mention these resources to the children before sending the text home. Alternatively, you may feel that printing them out for the children to be accessed at home is the most useful way for children to complete the resources.
To highlight the importance of reading to parents and carers, we have also produced a short video about the impact that continuing to read with children within Key Stage 2 can have. This link is also on the bookmarks which the children can take home, but it would be useful for you to circulate this to parents within your usual school communication system too.
“We know there are over 380,000 children across the UK today that have never owned a book, children that are in vulnerable environments. That has to change.” – Marcus Rashford
Video for Parents: Supporting our Children to Read by Jo Gray, Head of School Development and Literacy and Senior Education Consultant.
See below for the available resources:
