Mrs Gidden's cool readers club - Jake

Priory’s Head of English, Mrs Gidden, has been really impressed with many of our multi-talented pupils lately and wanted to highlight their love of reading alongside their other talents.

This week she interviewed Year 8 pupil, Jake, and said “Jake is on the football team, plus he’s in set one and doing really well and I want to raise the profile of pupils who are ‘cool’ and read, too.” 

Mrs Gidden interviewed Jake about fitting in being a footballer and being a top reader and loving Michael Morpurgo books:

All rounder Jake is ‘scoring’ high in reading and football.

“My favourite author is Michael Morpurgo. I think his books are all really interesting. His books are never boring; they’re about things I like reading about, like the First World War. In History, I like learning about the war as it’s part of our culture and we should know about our past.”

“One thing I learnt recently and understood for the first time was how much the war affected families like ours. For example, when the men had to leave and go to fight, farm workers lost not only their employees but their sons and fathers as well and I hadn’t really thought about it before. 

“When I read the most recent Morpurgo book, Private Peaceful, I understood that fighting in the Wars wasn’t their job, it was their duty and they had to go and so many men sacrificed their lives.

“My first Morpurgo book was ‘War Horse’. I read this in November, around Armistice Day and one of my favourite parts was where two soldiers helped to free Joey, the horse, from some barbed wire, and they made friends. One soldier was German and one was English and it fascinated me that these individuals didn’t individually hate each other, they were made to fight against each other and I thought Morpurgo had really cleverly done this so we as readers thought about each individual that war affects. 

“I have just taken another Morpurgo book from the library called ‘The Eagle in the Snow’ and I’ll probably read it in class in my AR (Accelerated Reader) slot with my set one Year 8 English group or when I go to my Dad’s on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays after football. 

“It’s hard balancing all my homework, being on the football team and trying to become a ‘Word Millionaire’ at the same time but it’s fun. 

“I still love football more than reading but reading is fun too. I have 179,000 words up to now which is increasing my reading age and helping me get better at English.”