In KS2, students will begin to move on from learning to read phonics and decoding words to interpretation and more complex reading and writing skills. By the start of year three, most children will have 300 words in their reading, writing, and speaking vocabulary. By the end of year six, children are generally expected to be confident and capable readers.
In KS2, children will focus on refining existing skills (handwriting becoming more accurate and neater, using grammar correctly) while developing new skills simultaneously (imaginative writing, deductive writing, characters). As a teacher, your reading corner should reflect the level your students are at to keep them motivated and challenged to keep learning each day.
This article will look at some KS2 reading corner activities that get your students involved in the reading corner and literature.
1. An Awards Wall and Voting Station
Engaging students with classroom reading corner ideas is a great way to give them a sense of ownership, responsibility, and inclusivity. A fun way to do this is by getting the class to vote on various matters, the results of which are displayed on the wall of the reading corner.
Do this by setting up a voting station in the reading corner with a supply of ballots and voting boxes. You can have several on the go at once to make it more exciting. Once the votes are in, the winners are displayed on the reading corner award wall (which you can decorate creatively to look like a stage, an awards cabinet, or anything else that has a similar effect). Get hold of some glitter or foil poster paper to make your awards wall stand out.
Have each student write their name on their voting slip to avoid any highjacking! You could even incentivise this activity by only handing out voting ballots after completing certain activities, such as completing a reading task.
Ideas for voting subjects could be:
- Most evil fictional villain
- Next story to be read in class
- Best book in the reading corner
- The favourite author of the class
- The bravest fictional character of the term
Use a tabletop book rack to display the best book contenders and a big book display rack to show off the winner.
2. A Bulletin Board
Similar to the awards wall, a bulletin board will have the whole class roleplaying as a team of reporters and allows the students to create something of their own to add to the display. Task the students with creating a page for a newspaper, the product of which will be put on display on the reading corner bulletin board.
The possibilities are endless with the content of this task which can be adapted to all different ages. You could either assign each student a specific page of the paper (one to write a weather report, one to write the classified ads, one to write a report on the plants in the school playground, and so on). Otherwise, task the kids with coming up with their own topic.
This is an excellent writing task to help children practice writing skills and help them to learn about what is covered in the day-to-day news. If you want to spice this project up, perhaps look at it through the lens of a book you’re reading as a class—a newspaper based on The Quibbler from Harry Potter, anyone?
DIY your own bulletin board or create a highly professional-looking one with our Crystal Wall School Bulletin Board made with PETG and with A3, A4, and A5 pockets to display the creations.
From reading corner display quotes to websites you can print off posters for free; find everything you need to make a stunning reading corner display in our blog.
- Ideas for Your Classroom Reading Corner Display
- 25 Reading Corner Display Quotes
- Resources for Classroom Reading Corner Quotes
- Reading Corner Display Printables: What You Need and Where to Find Them
- Make a Winning Reading Corner Display Banner
- The Best Places to Find Printable Reading Corner Display Posters
- Our Top 7 Reading Corner Display Lettering Sets
- Make or Download a Printable Reading Corner Display Banner
3. Book Reviews
How do you know if you want to read a book? Cover art is a fantastic way to get kids excited about cracking open a story (in fact we’ve found somewhere you can download book cover posters for free), but getting recommendations from others is a surefire way to know if you’ll like a book.
Reading reviews of the books their peers have read encourages students to pick up those stories and incentivises everyone to keep on reading, leaving reviews on the reading corner wall after completing each book.
Make review writing more exciting for the children by putting up some of the best quotes from reviews in large font with quotation marks. To help the students approach writing reviews, you could give them criteria to rate the book out of five stars or come up with criteria together. Consider including such areas as ‘creative writing ability’, ‘exciting story’, and ‘believable characters’.
Take a look at our display shapes to take some legwork out of creating a review board. We particularly like the thought bubbles and the question mark and speech bubble set.
Make the most of your display with all the right reading area furniture. Our blog covers reading corner seating, rugs, cushions, storage, and other essentials.
- DIY Reading Corner Ideas
- Reading Corner Display Ideas for EYFS, KS1, and KS2
- Springboard Supplies’ Guide to Reading Corner Furniture
- Reading Corner Canopy Ideas
- 10 Reading Corner Rugs Teachers Love
- 7 Reading Corner Classroom Library Decorating Ideas
- Tips for Making a Cozy Reading Corner
- Reading Corner Phonics Books from the Teaching Supplies Experts
4. Build-a-Story Board
You might have played the build-a-story game before—it makes a fun and valuable activity for an English lesson. This is a group activity in which the first person writes down the first line of a story at the top of a piece of paper, folds it back, so it’s out of view, and then passes the paper to the next person. Then, it’s their turn to write the following line, and so on.
The task needs to be structured to ensure the story doesn’t become nonsense. The first line should set the scene; the second describes the first character, etc. At the end, the whole story is unfolded and read aloud. This inevitably makes for some laughs.
We love the idea of adapting this game into one big group activity on the wall of your reading corner, and you can do it in several different ways:
- Create one big story or several stories in groups but don’t reveal the stories at the end of the game. Instead, recreate them line for line on the reading corner display wall for the students to see when they come in the following day.
- Task each student with writing a line of the story directly on the display paper, then cover it up with some blank poster paper. When the story is finished, you can mount it on the wall and uncover the lines one by one.
- If you want to put more effort into how a story is structured and work on creating one together, remove the element of mystery, and ask the students to come up with a line each, writing it directly onto the wall as you go. This will allow the children to think about what has happened in the story so far and how to adapt their contributions.
