Webinar: Cultivating belonging through shared reading
Hear from Dr Lisa Cherry, members of BookTrust’s research team and Amy Salter at Sutton Virtual School for insights and practical solutions for using shared reading to support connection and belonging with children from vulnerable backgrounds.
Dr Lisa Cherry
About the webinar
This webinar with Dr Lisa Cherry explores how shared reading can become a relational practice that helps children feel safe, seen and connected.
Through discussions with practitioners and examples from children’s books, we’ll reflect on how shared reading can open conversations about identity, family and lived experience, particularly for children in kinship care, foster care and adoption.
In this recording, you’ll:
- Hear insights from Dr Cherry’s work on relational practice, alongside emerging thinking from BookTrust on bonding, attachment and shared reading. If there are two things to take away from Dr Cherry’s work it’s that reading is about so much more than literacy outcomes and that belonging and mattering are not optional.
- Discover practical ways to use children’s books to open conversations about identity, family experience and belonging with children and carers. With a few book recommendations mentioned in the webinar!
- Learn how you could use shared reading in practice from an example shared from Sutton Virtual School using BookTrust’s Letterbox Club so that families and carers have resources at home to take part in shared reading with children (along with a very special moment when a designated teacher had a breakthrough with a young person through a shared reading experience).
Links mentioned in the webinar:
About the speakers
Dr Lisa Cherry is an author, researcher, leading international trainer and consultant, specialising in assisting schools, services and systems to create systemic change to the way that we work with those experiencing and living with the legacy of trauma.
Dr Fiona Abades-Barclay is from BookTrust’s Research Team.
Amy Salter is a Looked-After Child Education Advisor from Sutton Virtual School.
Belonging book recommendation list
Register below to receive a Belonging book recommendation list curated by BookTrust in partnership with Dr Cherry. By registering, you’ll also receive updates from us on new programme information, upcoming webinars and research reports that we think will be of interest. You can unsubscribe from these at any time.
Find out more about BookTrust’s programmes
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A book subscription service for ages 1–4 that embeds sharing stories at home to strengthen bonding and attachment for foster, kinship and adoptive families.
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Join hundreds of schools and local authorities using Letterbox Club to bring the magic of reading and numeracy to pupil premium and vulnerable learners age 3–13