ABSTRACT
Teachers in classrooms in which children have become a community of engaged, empathetic, insightful and critical readers and writers of fiction have nearly always attended to the quality of what Aidan Chambers calls ‘the reading environment’. The fiction collection is a most important resource for every primary school and benefits from having a specialist librarian who is knowledgeable about children’s stories, poems and plays as well as about organizational matters. However this has cost implications, and often schools appoint a teacher willing to build on a special interest in children’s literature and put in time in the library, perhaps with the help of a classroom assistant. The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education is one of a number of organizations which have made a huge contribution to advising schools on how to make their resources for the classroom rich and wide. Children need some guidance on how to make discussions truly part of the learning.
