Tag: reading

August 31, 2017

RED Book Award

The RED Book Award is Falkirk Council’s Book Award in which each secondary school in the authority participate. RED stands for Read, Enjoy, Debate and is all about reading for enjoyment and stimulating lively debate about books. https://twitter.com/readenjoydebate?lang=en

The award is now in its 12^th year. This year’s shortlist is:

Rebel of the Sands by Alwyn Hamilton

Welcome to Nowhere by Elizabeth Laird

Boy X by Dan Smith

Hell and High Water by Tanya Landman

13 and 14-year-olds from English classes in Bo’ness Academy, Braes High, Denny High, Falkirk High, Graeme High, Grangemouth High, Larbert High and St. Mungo’s High as well as reading groups in Polmont Young Offenders Institute and from a variety of countries take part. The young people read the 4 shortlisted titles, vote for their favourite book and produce a creative interpretation of one of the books for the award ceremony.

The Books

The shortlist of books is decided after lengthy debate by school and public librarians, young people feed in their opinions to the debate too. The criteria include books must be available in paperback, the author is available to attend the award ceremony and the books must have the wow factor.

The young people decide the winning book through a secret vote a few weeks before the award ceremony. The winner is revealed by opening the red envelope at the close of the big day!

Key Dates

April – August: A longlist of books is read from which the shortlist is agreed.

September – April: Young people read, enjoy and debate the books.

April: Pupils vote for their favourite book.

May: The RED Book Award ceremony held at the Falkirk Town Hall FTH

The RED Book Award Ceremony

Around 250 young people and invited guests pack into the Falkirk Town Hall to participate in the RED Book Award ceremony. Participants are encouraged to wear a red accessory and there are prizes (sponsored by Bright Red Books, www.brightredpublishing.co.uk) throughout the event for winners of the book review competition (sponsored by Palimpsest, www.palimpsest-bp.co.uk), a book cover design competition and best red accessory. The day is full of energy and fun and packed with a host of activities – from book signings and chatting with the authors to creative interpretations of the books and live entertainment by the young people.

The ceremony culminates in the opening of the red envelope to reveal the winning book.

Follow the RED on twitter.

Previous winners and shortlists:

RED 11 (2016-2017 award): 13 Hours by Narinder Dhami

Nominated:

The Apple Tart of Hope Sarah M Fitzgerald
The Year of the Rat Clare Furniss
Devil You Know Cathy MacPhail

RED 10 (2015-2016 award): Mind Blind by Lari Don

Nominated:

Beneath Gill Arbuthnot
Salvage Keren David
Inflicted Ria Frances

RED 9 (2014-2015 award): Raining Fire by Alan Gibbons

Nominated:

Rat Runners Oisin McGann
Mosi’s War Cathy MacPhail
Soul Shadows Alex Woolf

RED 8 (2013-2014 award): Slated byTeri Terry

Nominated:

Mortal Chaos Matt Dickinson
Torn David Massey
Mr Creecher Chris Priestly

RED 7 (2012-2013 award): An Act of Love by Alan Gibbons

Nominated:

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece Annabel Pitcher
Gladiator Simon Scarrow
Blood Red Road Moira Young

RED 6 (2011-12 award): Wasted by Nicola Morgan

Nominated:

Ausländer Paul Dowswell
Koh Tabu Ann Kelley
Black Out Sam Mills
Timeriders Alex Scarrow

RED 5 (2010-11 award): Grass by Cathy MacPhail

Nominated:

Wolfcry Julia Golding
Colony J A Henderson
Chalkline Jane Mitchell
Deathwatch Nicola Morgan

RED 4 (2009-10 award): Divided City by Theresa Breslin

Nominated:

Don’t Tell Sandra Glover
Beast Ally Kennan
Forged in the Fire Ann Turnbull

RED 3 (2008-09 award): Worse Than Boys by Cathy MacPhail

Nominated:

Message from Mia Sandra Glover
Bunker 10 J A Henderson Fearless Tim Lott
Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea Michael Morpurgo

RED 2 (2007-08 award): Blood Ties by Sophie McKenzie

Nominated:

The Ice Cream Con Jimmy Docherty
Ostrich Boys Keith Gray
Strangled Silence Oisin McGann
Spider Linda Strachan

RED 1 (2006-07 award): Looking for JJ by Anne Cassidy

Nominated:

The Star of Kazan Eva Ibbotson
Airborn Kenneth Oppel
Tamar Mal Peet
Montmorency Eleanor Updale

May 26, 2017

Read Write Count

Read, Write, Count is a new campaign to improve the literacy and numeracy skills of Scotland’s children by providing advice and support for the families of children in Primary 1, 2 and 3. It is a key part of the Scottish Government’s commitment to raise attainment for all and close the attainment gap.

Read, Write, Count aims to build on the success of the Play Talk Read and Bookbug programmes in the early years and encourage parents and families to include easy and fun reading, writing and counting activities in their everyday lives. For many years, Through the Read, Write, Count campaign, all P1 to P3 children will receive a free bag with books, counting games and writing materials in the autumn of this year.

Research tells us that parental involvement in children’s learning is one of the best ways to improve educational outcomes for all children. Read, Write, Count is about giving parents the confidence to get involved and provides resources to support learning at home.

http://scottishbooktrust.com/learning/read-write-count/

Contact Yvonne Manning, yvonne.manning@falkirk.gov.uk 01324 501990 for more information.

November 23, 2015

Book Week Scotland 2015

Book Week Scotland runs from 23rd – 29th November. This is a wonderful opportunity to celebrate books and reading. Visit Scottish Book Trust’s website to find out what is happening during this week, to find out how you can contribute and to get ideas to make reading irresistible for your children. The Learning Resource Service will be leading events throughout the week in a variety of places including nurseries, schools and Polmont Young Offenders Institute. Let the Learning Resource Service, lrs@falkirk.gov.uk know what you are doing to celebrate Book Week Scotland.

Enjoy!

March 18, 2015

Reading Strategies in Action at Nethermains (P4)

Caroline Cane, Probationer teacher at Nethermains is really excited to share this story from her P4 class:

We were developing our understanding of a short text we watched online using our reading strategies.

First, we recorded everything we knew about treasure and put the word treasure into an extended sentence.

Here is an example from one of our pupils:

‘Pirate Pete was on a mission to find the hidden treasure when he arrived on a small island because he found an old treasure map in his ship’.

We then worked as visualisers and drew what we thought the story was going to be about based on the still image that Mrs Cane showed us.

Next we discussed who the character was and why they were looking for treasure. We created our own questions for our shoulder partner to answer.

One of our pupils independently wrote a fantastic summary of the text and used some interesting vocabulary.

March 9, 2015

Active Literacy at Ladeside Primary School

Here’s what’s going on at Ladeside:

Our Literacy RACI group has been focusing on reading for enjoyment. We have several classes involved in Paired Reading. Older pupils have been trained to buddy younger pupils. P7 been reading with LHS pupils at LHS Library. Calum Smith has been facilitating this. Yvonne Manning trained P6 pupils as storytellers. We have had a huge amount of input from the storytellers from Larbert community library and Falkirk Council’s Learning Resource Centre. We participated in the Scottish Children’s Book Awards by reading the novels and voting.

What do the pupils say about paired reading at Ladeside?

P.6 Big Buddy talking about EAL P.3 pupil: “I feel that my Little Buddy’s expression and volume has improved since I started reading with him.”

P.6 Big Buddy: “I think that Paired Reading is important for the future because the younger pupils get help to understand reading better and then they will get a good job when they grow up.”

P.6 Big Buddy: “ Paired Reading helps with everyone’s confidence. At the beginning, my Little Buddy didn’t want to read and now she always wants to read by herself.”

P.6 Big Buddy: “The Paired Reading training will help me in the future not just when I read with someone but will help me to be a good learner and mini-teacher too.”

P.3 teacher: “Paired reading has been a great success with my Primary 3 class. The Primary 6 pupils were well organised, confident and excellent role models at reading. The Primary 3 pupils involved really looked forward to the days their Primary 6 buddies were coming. They read a variety of appropriate texts and were able to discuss them with their buddy and answer relevant questions.”

Parent of Big Buddy: “He’s having a really great year. We’ve heard all about the Reading Buddies. He was so happy to have been chosen.”

March 6, 2015

Raising Attainment – Sharing Good Practice Nationally

Falkirk Council recently shared their approach to raising attainment in literacy at the National Literacy Network. Our Literacy Strategy was shared, with examples of good practice from each work stream. Colleagues from across sectors and from all over Scotland attended the session and feedback was extremely positive.

St. Bernadette’s pupils stunning rap demonstrating the 6 reading comprehension strategies was shared and was really well received. Colleagues really liked the way the pupils demonstrated their understanding in a very creative way.

Active Literacy work from Bonnybridge Primary School was also shared and colleagues were impressed with the range of active literacy strategies which were shared.

Colleagues were impressed with the work Falkirk is carrying out to support parents and carers. We shared some of our you tube animations for parents/ carers and parental leaflets. We also shared the you tube training videos which are available 24/7 for teachers to access to support the delivery of active literacy in the classroom and outwith.

Our key successes for this year so far have been populating the work streams of our Literacy Strategy, a consistent approach to teaching higher order reading skills and consistency of approach. Our next steps are to take the strategy forward even further to continue to raise attainment and close the gap.

It was a really enjoyable morning sharing good practice and engaging in professional dialogue with colleagues.

We are really excited to take this forward in the future.

March 4, 2015

Sharing Reading Approaches with Parents and Carers at St. Bernadette’s RCPS

Parents and carers from St. Bernadette’s RCPS engaged in an active learning reading session on Thursday 26th February. Pupils from across the stages participated in the session sharing their knowledge and understanding of reading skills and strategies with both parents and visitors from St. Ninian’s Primary School in Stirling.

Falkirk Council’s Literacy team delivered the session sharing the good practice embedded in the school and two P6 pupils confidently and competently delivered a short presentation which included a very impressive i-movie and musical rap demonstrating reading skills.

Parents took part in a thinking reader session using the text ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’. The strategies and key ideas to support children at home were shared and explained.

The six strategies are:

1) Prior knowledge and understanding

2) Metalinguistics

3) Visualisation

4) Inference

5) Main ideas

6) Summarising.

The visitors were then treated to a marketplace style tour of pupil work from across the stages.

Feedback included:

This was enjoyable, fun, great insight into children’s learning. It’s amazing to have the evidence exhibited in children…. Amazing
Good to show how the kids learn and the wide variety of text. Learned how important the kids understanding the text is and understanding of words.
Very informative so impressed by the work of the pupils. Fab!
The session was very helpful. Helps me understand more about how reading is taught and delivered in school! Will use at home.
Very useful allowed insight into strategies employed within school (would be helpful having “bullet point” newsletter on this.
I really enjoyed this session. I find it incredible and inspiring to realise the skills the children are managing to acquire at such a young age.
Reading is a wonderful life skill so anything that encourages it is a great idea.
I found the session helpful in relation to encouraging reading skills to my grandson. Maybe an information night for grandparents/carers would be beneficial.
Really good to see such creative children that seem to really enjoy what they are doing.

February 20, 2015

Closing the Gap

Falkirk Council: Closing the Gap

A number of Falkirk Council schools are in the first phase of a Partnership Project that is funded by Education Scotland’s School Improvement Partnership Programmes (SIPP).

The SIPP is a collaborative school improvement strategy that promotes new ways of working across classroom, school and local authorities. Data and collaborative enquiry are used to innovate, test and refine new approaches to tackle the attainment gap.

Falkirk Council is currently one of 7 local authorities funded to work with the Robert Owen Centre, University of Glasgow. Projects across authorities are wide ranging and are very different but the main focus of each is to use collaboration and enquiry to tackle educational inequity and ‘Close the Gap’ for pupils.

Falkirk Council’s identified task is to pilot a staged intervention approach to low attainment in literacy in the upper primary, involving the building of family capacity in areas of relative deprivation.

This is an exciting joint initiative between Schools and Community Learning and Development. Seven primary schools within Falkirk and Grangemouth clusters have signed up for the project. These schools are using a systematic literacy intervention programme called High Five (Family Fischer trust) with small groups of pupils in P7 who have attained lower literacy scores. Alongside this, the Community Learning and Development team are providing additional opportunities for the pupils and their families to encourage motivation and ambition. Opportunities for enhanced transition to High School are also being explored.

The literacy intervention programme will run for a minimum of 20 weeks. Some parents have engaged with the process and have signed up for additional CLD activities.

Robust quantitative and qualitative data is being gathered and will be presented to SIPP, and pupil progress will be tracked from P7-S2.

So far, pupils are enjoying their experiences using age appropriate strategies and structured reading materials.

February 11, 2015

Active Literacy – A Probationer’s Story

Alix Thomson, a P3 Probationer teacher at Victoria Primary is delighted to share her experiences implementing active reading in her class. Here is Alix’s story:

This term my P3 class, at Victoria Primary, have been working on developing their comprehension skills, with a particular focus on summarising. The lessons have been successful and the pupils have really developed their skills, so I thought that I would share them with you as you said to send on anything that was working well.

The class began developing their summarising skills by focussing on key words. They used key words in lots of different ways.

Picking out key words in reading books: choosing the most important word on each page and explaining why; covering up words to see if they were essential for understanding the sentence.
Using different forms of text to further our understanding of the importance of key words: using shop catalogues as their text, pupils had to pick key words to describe an item to a partner without using the name of the product – could their partner work out what they had chosen?; watching or listening to news stories and noting down the key words.
The class also started including key words in our Busy Starts: key words from a well known story or film were displayed on the smartboard and pupils had to work out which book or film it was; this then progressed into pupils setting challenges for classmates – what film were their key words describing?

Then pupils developed their understanding by using key words to help them to summarise texts.

Note taking: whilst watching a short video clip of our class book (Farmer Duck), we took notes on a whiteboard, trying only to note down key words; these notes helped us to create storyboards summarising the story.
One sentence summaries: pupils had to write a sentence to describe their reading book; this skill was then used throughout all curricular areas with pupils using one sentence summaries to describe any of our lessons, or to recap on learning during a lesson.

January 22, 2015

Literacy Strategy Celebration of Success

Monday 12th January saw over 100 people attending a celebration of Falkirk Council’s Literacy Strategy event at Camelon Education Centre. Representatives from all of the 8 work streams including parents, pupils from Bonnybridge Primary and Grangemouth High School, teachers, Education Scotland, Library Resource Services, businesses, partners, Falkirk Herald, Forth Valley College, the author Stuart Reid, librarians, development officers from neighbouring authorities, Scottish Book Trust, Employment and Training Unit, Moneywise Project, Entrepreneur Me and Renella.

Key note speakers Helen Fairlie, Literacy Development Officer, Education Scotland and Anne Pearson, Acting Director of Education started the celebration event off with positive news about how Falkirk Council are raising attainment in literacy.

After hearing the key note speakers, participants broke off into work stream groups to engage in professional dialogue and share their contributions to the literacy strategy to date. They then examined next steps and further ways forward to support ‘zero tolerance to illiteracy’.

Here are a few samples of photographs from the event: