Literacy
At OSWBA, we are determined to ensure our students are competent in their ability to read, write and speak. Our aim is to inspire a love of reading and raise standards for all our pupils, so that they can read confidently, fluently and with understanding .
On our website, you will find useful resources to help your child be the confident reader we want them to be. These include: advice for how to help your children read at home, book recommendations, and virtual tours of our library coming soon!
Sparx Reader, NGRTs & Lexonic
What is SPARX Reader?
All students in years 7 and 8 use Sparx Reader to complete their weekly reading homework.
Sparx Reader helps every student to achieve regular independent reading, which is incredibly important for building vital literacy skills.
Students can choose from a range of e-books at their appropriate level. As they read, they will answer questions to check they are reading carefully. Careful readers earn points meaning they can track their progress and climb the league table!
Motivated readers who demonstrate consistent, careful reading can unlock Gold Reader. This means they can read any paper book from the library or from home by scanning in its barcode.
How do they log in?
Students log in at sparxreader.com. They will need to find their school and log in using their Sparx Maths details.
What devices are supported?
Your child can access Sparx Reader on any device that connects to the internet with a web browser.
How can I support my child with their reading?
Sparx Reader adapts to each student’s reading level, so it’s important that you don’t help by answering questions for them. If you help them, Sparx Reader might think they’re a very strong reader and show them books that are too difficult. You can however help to provide a quiet space for your child to focus on their reading homework each week.
The best way to support your child is to ask them about the book they’re reading; what aspects they’re enjoying, or what characters and events they’ve recently read about.
If your child is struggling to get the questions right, and therefore earn Sparx Reader points, get them to try reading the text aloud. This will help with their comprehension.
How can I monitor the reading my child is doing?
You can keep track of the reading your child is doing by clicking through the link to the Parent Portal in your Sparx Maths weekly homework email.
On the Parent Portal, you can choose to view homework progress for any Sparx learning system your child is using. For Sparx Reader, you can see progress with the current and previous homework and browse books that your child has been reading as part of their current homework.
What support is available at school?
Homework club takes place every day, where students can use a computer to do their homework. Laptops are also available before school from 8:15am, breaktime and lunchtime in the library.
NGRT stands for ‘New Group Reading Test’. This is a standardised test which will generate a Standardised Age Score, from which we obtain students’ reading ages.
What is meant by a ‘reading age’?
A reading age is a measure of a student’s reading ability compared to the average student of a specific age. For example, a student who is 14 years and 3 months old may have a reading age of 15 years and 2 months, meaning they read slightly better than average readers in their age group.
When are these completed?
We test students twice per year – once near the start of the academic year, and again in the Spring.
What happens with this information?
Once the tests have been completed, we communicate students’ reading ages with teachers so that we can provide suitable support in lessons. If a student’s reading age is lower than their chronological age, we offer the Lexonic Leap or Lexonic Advance programme (further details on this page). Evidence suggests that these programmes significantly help students to build stronger skills in reading.
What is Lexonic?
Your child may tell you that they are taking part in Lexonic Leap or Lexonic Advance. These are special reading programmes that help students build stronger skills in reading and understanding words. Here is what each one means.
What Is Lexonic Leap?
Lexonic Leap is a short, small group intervention for children who can find reading difficult.
It focuses on the sounds in words (phonics) so students can match letters to sounds more easily.
Sessions are fun and fast, using games and quick activities.
The aim is to give a big boost in confidence and to help your child read texts more smoothly.
What Is Lexonic Advance?
Lexonic Advance is the next step up. It is for students who may need help with word structure and meaning.
Lessons teach how words are built from roots, prefixes and suffixes.
Students learn to spot patterns, so they can work out the meaning of new or longer words.
This improves reading speed, spelling and understanding of difficult vocabulary.
Book Recommendations for All Years
Wonder
August (‘Auggie’) Pullman can’t help but stand out – he was born with a severe facial deformity. Wonder follows Auggie as he experiences more than the usual ups-and-downs of friendships, family and school.
The Hobbit
Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life. However, his contentment is disturbed when the wizard, Gandalf, and a company of thirteen dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day, to whisk him away on a journey ‘there and back again’. They have a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon…
Percy Jackson and the Lightening Thief
I didn’t want to be a half-blood. I never asked to be the son of a Greek God. I was just a normal kid until I accidentally vaporised my maths teacher. That’s when things started really going wrong. Now I spend my time fighting with swords, battling monsters with my friends, and generally trying to stay alive.
The Girl Who Drank the Moon
Every year, the people of the Protectorate leave a baby as an offering to the witch who lives in the forest. They hope this sacrifice will keep her from terrorising their town. But the witch in the forest, Xan, is kind. She shares her home with a wise swamp monster and a perfectly tiny dragon.
Holes
Stanley’s family has a history of bad luck. A miscarriage of justice sends him to Camp Green Lake Juvenile Detention Centre, which isn’t green and doesn’t have a lake. Every day he and the other inmates are told to dig a hole each, five foot wide by five foot deep, reporting anything they find. Why?
A Wrinkle in Time
When Charles and Meg Murry go searching through a ‘wrinkle in time’ for their lost father, they find themselves on an evil planet where all life is enslaved by a huge pulsating brain known as ‘It’. Meg, Charles and their friend Calvin embark on a cosmic journey helped by the funny and mysterious trio of guardian angels.
The War That Saved Me
Nine-year-old Ada has never left her one-room flat. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada’s twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn’t waste a minute—she sneaks out to join him.
The Girl of Ink and Stars
Forbidden to leave her island, Isabella dreams of the faraway lands her cartographer father once mapped. When her friend disappears, she volunteers to guide the search. The world beyond the walls is a monster-filled wasteland – and beneath the dry rivers and smoking mountains, a fire demon is stirring from its sleep. Soon, following her map, her heart and an ancient myth, Isabella discovers the true end of her journey: to save the island itself.
The London Eye Mystery
11.32 a.m. Ted and his sister Kat watch their cousin Salim get on board the London Eye. The pod rises from the ground, high above the city.
12.02 p.m. The pod lands and the doors open. Everyone exits – everyone but Salim. Has he spontaneously combusted? (Ted’s theory.) Has he been kidnapped? (Aunt Gloria’s theory.)
Is he even still alive? (The family’s unspoken fear.)
Ghost
Castle Cranshaw is running away from some bad experiences. He joins the track team at his school but ends up making some even worse decisions that get him into trouble. With the help of mentor Mr. Brody, can Castle move towards a more positive future?
The Hunger Games
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by 12 outlying districts. The Capitol keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of 12 and 18 to participate in the annual Hunger Games. A fight to the death on live TV.
The Book Thief
By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed forever when she picks up a single object, abandoned in the snow. It is The Gravedigger’s Handbook, and this is her first act of book thievery. So begins Liesel’s love affair with books and words, and soon she is stealing from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library . . . wherever there are books to be found.
A Good Girls Guide to Murder
The case is closed. Five years ago, schoolgirl Andie Bell was murdered by Sal Singh. The police know he did it. Everyone in town knows he did it.
But having grown up in the same small town that was consumed by the crime, Pippa Fitz-Amobi isn’t so sure. When she chooses the case as the topic for her final project, she starts to uncover secrets that someone in town desperately wants to stay hidden
The Giver
It is the future. There is no war, no hunger, no pain. No one in the community wants for anything. At twelve years old, each member of the community has their profession carefully chosen for them.
Twelve-year old Jonas has never thought there was anything wrong with his world. But from the moment he is selected as the Receiver of Memory, Jonas discovers that their community is not as perfect as it seems.
Ghost Boys
ALIVE
Twelve-year-old Jerome doesn’t get into trouble. He goes to school. He does his homework. He takes care of his little sister.
Then Jerome is shot by a police officer who mistakes his toy gun for a real threat.
DEAD
As a ghost, watching his family trying to cope with his death, Jerome notices other ghost boys.
Each boy has a story, and they all have something in common…
The Graveyard Book
Bod is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, raised and educated by ghosts. There, living among the dead, Bod discovers that he possesses remarkable magical powers: he can avoid people’s notice, scare them, and even invade their dreams.
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry
This is the story of a family’s struggle to maintain their integrity, pride and independence against the forces of a cruelly racist society.
‘We have no choice of what colour we’re born or who our parents are or whether we’re rich or poor. What we do have is some choice over what we make of our lives once we’re here.’
I Am Malala
Raised in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, Malala was taught to stand up for her beliefs. When terrorists took control of her region and declared girls were forbidden from going to school, Malala fought for her right to an education. And, on 9 October 2012, she nearly paid the ultimate price for her courage when she was shot on her way home from school.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Nine-year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with.
Private Peaceful
As young Thomas Peaceful looks back over his childhood from the battlefields of the First World War, his memories are full of family life deep in the countryside.
But the clock is ticking, and every moment Thomas spends remembering how things used to be, means another moment closer to something that will change his life forever.
The Fault in our Stars
I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.
Despite the tumour-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis.
But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
To Kill a Mockingbird
‘Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ’em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird – a black man charged with a serious crime. Through the young years of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s.
Mrs Peregrine’s home for Peculiar Children.
A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children who once lived here – one of whom was his own grandfather – were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a desolate island for good reason.
And somehow – impossible though it seems – they may still be alive.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the nighttime
Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour’s lawn, he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets – for both Christopher and the rest of his family.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Charlie is a freshman. And while he’s not the biggest geek in the school, he is by no means popular. Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years yet socially awkward, he is a wallflower, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it. Charlie is attempting to navigate his way through the world of first dates, family dramas and new friends. But Charlie can’t stay on the sideline forever. There comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor.
Salt to the Sea
This inspirational novel is based on a true story from the Second World War. When the German ship the Wilhelm Gustloff was sunk in port in early 1945 it had over 9000 civilian refugees, including children, on board. Nearly all were drowned,
It’s early 1945 and a group of people trek across Germany, bound together by their desperation to reach the ship that can take them away from the war-ravaged land. Four young people, each haunted by their own dark secret, narrate their unforgettable stories.
Divergent
For sixteen-year-old Tris, the world changes in a heartbeat when she is forced to make a terrible choice. Turning her back on her family, Tris ventures out, alone, determined to find out where she truly belongs. Shocked by the brutality of her new life, Tris can trust no one. And yet she is drawn to a boy who seems to both threaten and protect her. The hardest choices may yet lie ahead….
Eleanor and Park
Eleanor is the new girl in town, and she’s never felt more alone. All mismatched clothes, mad red hair and chaotic home life, she couldn’t stick out more if she tried. Then she takes the seat on the bus next to Park. Quiet, careful and – in Eleanor’s eyes – impossibly cool. Slowly, steadily, through late-night conversations and an ever-growing stack of mix tapes, Eleanor and Park fall in love. They fall in love the way you do the first time, when you’re 16, and you have nothing and everything to lose.
The Grapes of Wrath
The Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desire and powerlessness. It explores themes of resilience, solidarity, exploitation, and the human spirit in the face of adversity.
A Monster Calls
Conor has the same dream every night, ever since his mother first fell ill, ever since she started the treatments that don’t quite seem to be working. But tonight is different. Tonight, when he wakes, there’s a visitor at his window. It’s ancient, elemental, a force of nature. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth.
Pride and Prejudice
The garrulous and empty-headed Mrs Bennet has only one aim – that of finding a good match for each of her five daughters. In this she is mocked by her cynical and indolent husband. This book explores contemporary anxiety around courtship, reputation and social expectations for women.
1984
Big Brother stares out from every poster; the Thought Police uncover every act of betrayal. When Winston finds love with Julia, he discovers that life does not have to be dull and deadening and awakens to new possibilities. Despite the police helicopters that hover and circle overhead, Winston and Julia begin to question the Party; they are drawn towards conspiracy. Yet Big Brother will not tolerate dissent – even in the mind.
The Catcher in the Rye
It’s Christmas time and Holden Caulfield has just been expelled from yet another school…
Fleeing the crooks at Pencey Prep, he pinballs around New York City seeking solace in fleeting encounters. The city is beautiful and terrible, in all its neon loneliness and seedy glamour, its mingled sense of possibility and emptiness. Holden passes through it like a ghost, thinking always of his kid sister Phoebe, the only person who really understands him, and his determination to escape the phonies and find a life of true meaning.
Frankenstein
Victor Frankenstein, driven by the mad dream of creating his own creature, experiments with alchemy and science to build a monster stitched together from dead remains. Once the creature becomes a living breathing articulate entity, it turns on its maker and the novel darkens into tragedy.
The Hate U Give
Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer. Now what Starr says could destroy her community. It could also get her killed.
Night
Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith.
Great Expectations
Great Expectations follows the narrator, Philip Pirrip (Pip), from a boy of shallow dreams to a man with depth of character. As Pip unravels the truth behind his own ‘great expectations’ in his quest to become a gentleman, the mysteries of the past and the convolutions of fate through a series of thrilling adventures serve to steer him towards maturity and his most important discovery of all – the truth about himself.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dorian Gray who, enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his depravity.
Secret History
Under the influence of a charismatic classic’s professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.
The Inheritance Games
Avery has a plan: keep her head down, work hard for a better future. Then an eccentric billionaire dies, leaving her almost his entire fortune. And no one, least of all Avery, knows why. Now she must move into the mansion she’s inherited. It’s filled with secrets and codes, and the old man’s surviving relatives -a family hell-bent on discovering why Avery got ‘their’ money.
Hamlet
Hamlet is not only one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, but also the most fascinatingly problematical tragedy in world literature. Its violence alternates with introspection, its melancholy with humour. Hamlet himself, is depicted as a complex, divided, introspective character.
Wuthering Heights
Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. He discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal of him. As Heathcliff’s bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, the innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.
Brave New World
Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here. Our perfect society achieves peace and stability by dispensing with monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs. You can be happy too. All you need to do is take your Soma pills.
Jane Eyre
Although the poor but plucky heroine is outwardly of plain appearance, she possesses an indomitable spirit, a sharp wit and great courage. She is forced to battle against a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order. All of which circumscribe her life and position when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious and attractive Mr Rochester.
One Day
TWENTY YEARS, TWO PEOPLE, ONE DAY.
15th July 1988. Emma and Dexter meet for the first time on the night of their graduation. Tomorrow they must go their separate ways.
So where will they be on this one day next year? And the year after that? And every year that follows?
Rebecca
He did not belong to me at all, he belonged to Rebecca. . . Everyone knows that Maxim de Winter was obsessed with his glamorous wife – and devastated by her tragic death. So, when he proposes to a shy, anxious young woman after a whirlwind meeting in the South of France, no one is more surprised than the new bride herself. But when they reach Manderley, his isolated Cornish mansion, Mrs de Winter begins to realise that every inch of her new home – and everyone in it – still belongs to Rebecca.
The Bell Jar
Working as an intern for a New York fashion magazine in the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood is on the brink of her future. Yet she is also on the edge of a darkness that makes her world increasingly unreal. Esther’s vision of the world shimmers and shifts: day-to-day living in the sultry city, her crazed men-friends, the hot dinner dances . . .
The Kite Runner
1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament, and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.
Normal People
Connell and Marianne grow up in the same small town in the west of Ireland, but the similarities end there. In school, Connell is popular and well-liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation – awkward but electrifying – something life-changing begins. Mutual fascination, friendship and love.
Atonement
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in their garden. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend.
By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined and will have become victims of the younger girl’s imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
Crime and Punishment
Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya can offer the chance of redemption.
The Handmaid’s Tale
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire – neither Offred’s nor that of the two men on which her future hangs…
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice’Gabriel García Márquez’s great masterpiece.
Though little more than a settlement surrounded by mountains, Macondo has its wars and disasters, even its wonders and its miracles.
A microcosm of Columbian life, its secrets lie hidden, encoded in a book, and only Aureliano Buendía can fathom its mysteries and reveal its shrouded destiny.
Midnight’s Children
Saleem Sinai – a child gifted with extraordinary powers after being born at the exact moment India becomes independent. The captivating events that unfold act as an allegory for India’s transition from colonialism to independence as Saleem finds himself ‘handcuffed to history’, with his fate entwined with that of his newly independent state.
Beloved
Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home, the farm where she was kept as a slave. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, she is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, ‘Beloved’.
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.
Anna Karenina
The story centres on an extramarital affair between Anna and dashing cavalry officer Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky that scandalises the social circles of Saint Petersburg. This forces the young lovers to flee to Italy in search for happiness, but after they return to Russia, their lives further unravel.
The Master and Margarita
The Devil, trailing fire and chaos in his wake, weaves himself out of the shadows and into Moscow one Spring afternoon. Brimming with magic and incident, it is full of imaginary, historical, terrifying and wonderful characters, from witches, poets and Biblical tyrants to the beautiful, courageous Margarita, who will do anything to save the imprisoned writer she loves.
Things Fall Apart
Okonowo is the greatest warrior alive. His fame has spread like a bushfire in West Africa, and he is one of the most powerful men of his clan. But he also has a fiery temper. Determined not to be like his father, he refuses to show weakness to anyone – even if the only way he can master his feelings is with his fists. When outsiders threaten the traditions of his clan, Okonowo takes violent action. Will the great man’s dangerous pride eventually destroy him?
Mrs. Dalloway
Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party.
Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers, gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists.
Clarissa’s life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith, whose madness escalates as his life draws toward inevitable suicide.