EIB Trocadéro - How Are We Helping Students Become Confident Readers and Writers in English from Day One?

By Elizabeth-Kate Palacin - Head of the English Department at EIB Trocadéro

At EIB Trocadéro, we believe that building our students’ self-confidence is the most important part of learning how to read and write. When pupils feel confident and secure enough, they start reading more and more fluently and improve every day.

Step by step, reading becomes something easy and achievable.

In our school, we use the Nelson Reading Comprehension textbooks, which provide a clear and progressive method. It offers an impressive diversity and quality of texts such as historic novel excerpts, dialogues inspired by classical stories such as The Little Red Riding Hood, newspaper articles about sports competitions and practical texts like pancake recipes. They also discover episodes from mythology, including Perseus and Medusa, which introduce them to more complex narrative texts.

Our students also have shared class reading sessions. The books chosen for these moments are intentionally less academic and more fun. Thanks to this approach, students associate reading with pleasure and curiosity rather than obligation.

By grade 4 and 5, they easily read novels from Roald Dahl or Michael Morpurgo.

Learning to read goes hand in hand with learning to write of course.

We want our students to learn how to write for a real life-goal. Writing should feel meaningful, not just like a classroom exercise, something they will use in their everyday life. By Grade 5, they know how to write an article, a description, an email, and even a formal or informal letter.

We also organize events at EIB Trocadéro that place reading and writing at the centre of students’ lives. The month of February is our Reading Month Event. During this time, students discover new books, present them to other classes and parents, and older students in Grades 4 and 5 read books to our Pre-K and Kindergarten classes.

Our goal is for students to develop a lifelong love of reading and writing, skills that are crucial for thinking and communicating in a world shaped by computers and AI.