Product reviews for Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English

With the renewed focus on reading in schools, there has never been a better time to join the Opening Doors journey. For years, Bob Cox and his team have been working on the promotion of high-quality reading texts in the primary and secondary classroom and how, in turn, that reading can support, develop and improve other areas of the school’s curriculum. Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English pulls together the team’s wide breadth of research, practice, experience and knowledge of literature into one easy-to-follow and accessible book. 

Everybody knows the importance of reading, but Bob Cox, Leah Crawford, Angela Jenkins and Julie Sargent offer something more than a quick fix. They offer several principles on how to use texts more effectively in the classroom so that all students can engage in high-quality reading material, regardless of ability or starting point. As a secondary school English teacher, I love how the Opening Doors team repositions the reading text in a lesson, placing the reader’s response, and relationship with the text, at the heart of the learning. Instead of reading a text and answering some generic comprehension texts, students explore, think, discuss and investigate how ideas are formed through the writing. Engagement with reading is at the heart of their methods and strategies. Reading isn’t just the simple decoding of words, but it is also about creating new ideas, thoughts, theories, questions, feelings and worlds. Students are engaging as readers and writers on both an emotional and a cerebral level through their methods, as cited by the numerous case studies. 

One of the book’s greatest strengths, for me, is the links to other texts, including poetry, classic fiction and current fiction. The book isn’t just the start of a reading journey for schools, but the start of the reading journey for teachers. All too often, we rely on the same few tried and tested poems or extracts. This book addresses that limitation in schools and starts teachers off with a map and compass on where to go next. 

Opening Doors to Ambitious Primary English doesn’t just open doors, but it opens the blinds, the curtains, the windows and even the patio door to new texts in the classroom and new ways of engaging with writers’ ideas, thoughts and techniques.