Author Archives: Mrs Kindness

Holyrood Library – Spring update

We started our Library Teams page in February to keep in touch and share book chat. All activities were organised or led by S1-3 pupils. What a fantastic time we’ve had! Thank you to everyone in our Team, both for contributing, and reading along during lockdown. Hope you all had fun!

Competitions

Our first competition, created by Zara, was ‘Create your own Character’. Our prizewinning entries came from Rose K. & Sahar (S1), and Brenna (S2).

Rose (S1)

We loved the skill shown in Rose’s drawing and how the character matched the description.

Sahar (S1)

Sahar: An excellent character and description, great imagination in choosing to make the character a villain!

Brenna (S2)

Fantastic use of description and colour in Brenna’s drawing to bring this character to life.

Our next competition idea came from Rose ‘Tell your favourite story with a Twist’. Cillian used his knowledge of Tom Gates, to come up with an alternative ending, involving Tom’s mum.

We also enjoyed making Origami bookmarks . So impressed by B. M’s bookmark:

As we’ve all been doing more cooking during lockdown, we started looking at Recipe Books.

Eman, Anna and Bilal came up with some brilliant ideas for recipes, I enjoyed trying out these ideas for a Toasted sandwich , Feta Pasta bake and Ms Longo made this great find of an easy to make version of Gulab jamun (I’ve still to try this – it looks wonderful)!

Next we shared our Favourite books. Here are some of the titles that Anna, Zara, & Abdul recommend.

Harry Potter, the Faraway Tree and Dork diaries and Percy Jackson series are also firm favourites.

Anna’s Quiz was a highlight and kept us entertained throughout an entire day. There was much discussion and we had fun trying to come up with our answers. What a brilliant quizmaster! Bilal edged a win, closely followed by Rose, Zara (and Ms Longo and I did pretty well too I’m pleased to say)! Everyone was very sporting in providing clues and congratulating one another.

Our last activity before the holiday break was ‘Re-create your favourite Book Cover’, Eman drew this stunning mosaic style version of ‘The Girl who Lost her Shadow’, which got a lovely comment from author Emily Ilett.

Thank you to Ms Longo for the wonderful video to help us access Glasgow Libraries eBooks.

https://video.link/w/CUfhc

I now can’t wait to chat to all our team members in person to say a huge well done for all your work.

Also, a big thank you to our wonderful S3 Duke of Edinburgh pupils Laraib and Fiza who helped set up the Team and continued to add advice and ideas all the way through; and thank you also to Sarah, Miya, Nida and Chantelle. We wish you every success in completing your Duke of Edinburgh challenges.

Other activities Jan – March

The Library was used as one of the Hubs for our KW pupils. It was lovely to meet colleagues from other depts. and also to see the library resources still being used for research. Our helpful pupils also took an occasional break from classwork to help me unpack and review the new books.

They also decorated our Staff CLPL Library. What wonderful artwork! We wanted to make the most of the fantastic books ordered by Miss Callan, so we made bookmarks for our teachers. Thank you Jodie for printing the bookmark templates.

We enjoyed some Easter craft activities on the last day of term.

Look forward to seeing everyone back in the Library soon. Remember : face coverings, clean hands and surfaces, and keep a good distance so that we can all stay safe!

Holyrood Secondary Library, Book Week Scotland

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Book Week Scotland, 16th -22nd November

Pupil review

Here is our first pupil recommendation from Fatima S3, who does superb work helping out in the Library setting up book displays, and helping with crafts for the younger pupils. She is almost half way through this book by wonderful Scottish author Lindsay Littleson.

“I recommend ‘The Mixed-Up Summer of Lily McLean’. I really enjoyed reading it. It talks about summer, family and friends”.

We’ve also been using books to find out about Millport, which is the setting for part of this really exciting story.

We hope that other pupils will read this book, and also the next book by Lindsay Littleson, called ‘The Awkward Autumn of Lily McLean’

Here at Holyrood, Book Week Scotland is one of the highlights of our year ! We can’t wait to get started with celebrating books and reading, and join in the fun with authors, book lovers and the reading community all over Scotland!

We hope to be joining in with some of the online events listed here:

Book Week Scotland programme of events

In addition, we will be reading, sharing books, and holding our own celebration events all week:

How many Scottish authors and books set in Scotland can we read? There may also be some pupil book reviews!

Competition for S1 – design your own mini-book on a Scottish theme Collect an instruction sheet from the Library…. easy and fun! All entries will be displayed in the Library and you could win a prize.
Senior pupils will be reading stories from this anthology of writing about the ‘Future’. You can collect your free copy from the Library. Happy reading!

We will be sharing some of our work in pictures and writing all through the week, and hope that as many pupils and staff as possible will join us to celebrate Book Week Scotland

Holyrood Secondary #LibrariesWeek

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To celebrate #LibrariesWeek 6th-10th October, this blog has been written by one of our most enthusiastic and book – loving classes: Miss Belton’s S3 English Class, who are pleased to share their book recommendations with you.

Jared “My favourite book is The Avatar. As it was the only book in this series in the library, I also had to borrow other books. The library is fun because most of the books are fun to read, and this makes your reading better. I hope that you will try to read more too”.

Fantastic advice, thank you Jared.

Sawdah is one of our most enthusiastic readers and it is always great to see her in the Library. “My favourites include Cry Baby, the Story of Tracy Beaker, and the Dockside series, because there are so many titles in the series to read!”

Abdou “The book that I like reading is the Last Kids on Earth series by Max Brailler. It’s a book about monster zombies and kids surviving the apocalypse”.

Thanks to Abdou, other pupils have now enjoyed this series too!

Azeem likes “ all the Roald Dahl books, also comic books, and books about football”.

Denis and Mahmod both enjoyed a book that they read in class The Housekeeper’s Lunch – “this book was really funny and great because the housekeeper couldn’t have his lunch because the crows ate it all”.

Faizan says “My favourite book is Five Famous Fairy Tales”, This is a superb choice, containing tales by Hans Anderson and brothers Grimm. Abdullah recommends history books, and he has read many history and other non-fiction titles.

Fatima says “my favourite book is Dork Diaries. I like to read them because they are fun to read”. This is a very popular choice

This dedicated Class is always up for a challenge, and successfully completed last year’s Glasgow Libraries Christmas Reading Challenge, receiving certificates to mark their outstanding achievement.

As an experiment, we also tried reading as a Book Group – our chosen titles were Under the Skin, by Cathy Macphail, and the Fastest Boy in the World, by Elizabeth Laird. However, we decided that we preferred reading our own choice of books (although we do still like to have quiet discussion and share ideas together).

Miss Kindness, Librarian says “It has been a pleasure to see how this class have grown in enthusiasm and confidence over the past two years. I look forward to more fun projects and reading challenges with them”.

We would all like to say a big thank you to Miss Belton for all her patience, and enthusiasm, and for making the time for us to go to the library.

We hope you have a wonderful retirement and enjoy more time to read books and have new adventures.”.

Holyrood School Library – Summer Update (4)

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Amnesty Poetry Project

During Feb – March, Mrs Cooper’s senior EAL pupils took part in the Amnesty International Project ‘Words That Burn‘. This opportunity was made available to us by Amnesty International, Glasgow Libraries, and SLIC/ SLIF funding.

Our journey started when we attended our first ever Poetry slam at the Mitchel Library. Unsure what to expect, within minutes, we were completely enthralled by poets Cat Hepburn, Jenny Lindsay and Tawona Sitole. We could see that poetry could be both powerful, entertaining, and fun. We were so interested to hear Tawona, who is originally from Zimbabwe, speak (and sing) some poetry in his mother tongue. As many of our pupils are multi-lingual, we hoped the project would help us to celebrate and showcase these language skills.

Following this, we had visits at Holyrood from : Ash Dickinson – poet, performer and slam champion. Ash not only performed for us, but encouraged us to think about how to shape our own performances, with some excellent advice, coaching and video clips. Our next visitor was Pauline from Amnesty International. Pauline explained some of the great work that Amnesty do on human rights, and set some questions to help our team progress with their own poem.

Inspired by these workshops, the group began serious work on writing and perfecting their poem. This involved several lunchtime and after school sessions, working with the amazing Mrs. Cooper, who loves poetry. This showed great commitment as all already had busy schedules preparing for exams. However, it’s often the case that the most important learning takes place through extra-curricular activities and group projects, and our Team were growing in confidence, forging strong friendships and supporting each other in this challenge.

The day of the performance came, and we arrived at the beautiful venue of the St. Frances Centre in the Gorbals, determined to do our best.

The performance was a great success. Our team of 6 were: Rafia, Arooj, Aiman, Yasmine, Hamdi, and Kiaiyan, who gave a magnificent performance, using (at least) 7 languages, in their powerful poem ‘Fly Away Home’. They were highly commended by the judges, and could rightly feel very proud of this achievement.

Mrs Cooper and the team have now set up a lockdown Poetry club, and we hope to continue enjoying poetry together. The project was at times a little scary, challenging but mostly enjoyable. We also enjoyed hearing the performances of pupils from Govan High, Hillpark Secondary and Lourdes Secondary, and we wish them well in their future poem writing.

Our thanks go to Ash and all the poets; to Pauline, and also to Ian and Fiona from Glasgow Libraries for judging the poetry slam and organising all these great events for us. Also…..huge thanks and well done to Mrs. Cooper and our incredible pupils for all their hard work, and ‘nerves of steel’ in performing for the first time!

Find out more about the Amnesty project:

Amnesty International ‘Words that Burn’

Holyrood School Library, Summer update (3)

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Visit from Emily Ilett

Summer term was very different from usual, with pupils and staff doing fantastic work in lockdown. Many pupils have been using Glasgow Life e-resources such as BorrowBox , for e-books and audio-books, and Freegal for music streaming. However, nothing can quite replace the fun of real author coming to visit you, so we decided to get help from the best of the best : Emily Ilett, award winning local author, in a remote LiveLit event supported by the Scottish Book Trust!

Emily had already been out to visit Holyrood pupils, and gave a brilliant talk to Miss Sutherland’s S1 class back in March for World Book Day

We learned about one of Emily’s favourite subjects – ‘Sea animals’, and how she used her love of animals and conservation as inspiration for her book ‘The Girl Who Lost Her Shadow’.

The challenge for our remote event in June was, with the school building closed, and no physical contact – how could we get Emily to the pupils, so we could have fun, hear all of her great tips for writing, and do a pupil Q & A? The answer was …..an author video, made especially for Holyrood pupils. In it Emily reads a wonderful short story ‘Hello Neighbour’ which she wrote for lockdown (it’s very funny, especially the bit about the wasps’ nest….you’ll have to listen and I bet it will make you laugh!). She also answered terrific questions from Zoya, Nga and Augustina; and set a competition for us. The competition is now closed for the summer, but we might open it again next term – so you could have a wee practice if you’re bored during the holidays!

You can watch Emily’s video here. Just scan the QR code with your I-pad. (Big thanks to Mrs. Gunn for explaining to me how to do this). See – everyone is learning new skills here – pupils/ teachers/ librarian. You never stop learning, and it’s exciting!

There was a tight deadline to get competition entries in by the end of term, many of you rose to the challenge with magnificent entries. Winners were : Ella S1, Laraib and Eseosa (S2), and Augustina (S3). Emily was highly impressed by the entries. Great work from everyone who entered. We may try to make the winning entries into a short story collection for you to read. In the meantime, you can read ‘Hello Neighbour’, and more short stories and poems in this fantastic anthology by Cranachan publishing:

Read ‘Stay at Home’ here

Great fun for pupils, and includes resources for teachers!

See how many authors you already recognise, and you will also discover new favourite authors to enjoy. We will (hopefully) have many new books in the Library by the time you return to school.

Holyrood School Library, Spring update (2)

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‘Book Group, and Christmas fun!’

Here at Holyrood, we love working with our friends at Glasgow Libraries. In November, we held the first meeting of our pupil Book Club at Govanhill Library. We were invited by Alison Nicol, our local Community Librarian, who hosted the visit as part of the ‘Hurricane Book Club’.

Before meeting up, our 15 pupils read ‘I am Thunder’ by Muhammad Khan.

We then enjoyed visiting Govanhill Library, discussing the book and taking part in a live Twitter session, linking up with other schools. Best of all was the friendly welcome and hospitality at Govanhill, where we were made to feel very welcome by Alison and the Govanhill Library staff (we loved our cosy Book Group area, and also, the chocolate biscuits) ! Since then we have held 2 further meetings : our Book Club Christmas Lunch, and also a catch-up session to decide on our next book.

After an exciting voting session, not 1 – but 2 titles were chosen!

‘One’ by Sarah Crossan
‘Love, Hate & other Filters’ by Samira Ahmed

Some of us are now reading these ‘under lockdown’ and we can’t wait to meet up again for more book chat in our friendly group. Huge thanks to Alison for organising this, and also to Ms Blackburn for being part of our Book Group, and helping us walk safely to Govanhill Library.

Leading up to Christmas we put our minds to some serious reading by taking part in Glasgow Libraries Christmas Reading Challenge. Christmas time can be very hectic in schools, with pupils taking part in many fun activities such as concerts, charity and fundraising events, and S4,5 & 6 also sitting their prelim exams. This is such an important time to stock up on books for the holidays. 60 of our S1 pupils completed the Challenge by borrowing 3 or more books during the last week of term, and collected a superb certificate designed by Glasgow Libraries.

“Your book is a friend… the library makes books easy to get”. Wise words from these lovely pupils.

Most of this borrowing was done at lunchtimes and intervals, and our wonderful English dept. also helped by allowing pupils to take the long distance route from class to the Library, avoiding the exams in the ‘street’ area. Nothing can stop our pupils from reading, and we also enjoyed the fresh air and exercise on route to the Library. Special mention must go to Miss Belton’s S2 English class, who have shown great dedication to regular reading during their library visits, working their way through comics, non-fiction and now enjoying authors such as Cathy Macphail and Elizabeth Laird. We all look forward to enjoying more Reading Challenge events in the future.

Find out more about Book Groups, and how to join your local library at

https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/libraries

Holyrood School Library, Spring update (1)

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While we’re on an early spring break, it’s time to remember some of the fun things we’ve achieved this session. In November, during Book Week Scotland, we enjoyed a feast of activities including:

Ms Longo’s ‘Scavenger Hunt’ round the Library
a very well attended Lunchtime Book Quiz,
Visit from poet and Creative Writing Group leader – John Munro, who inspired pupils with great advice for getting started with writing.

John led 2 writing sessions, one for some lucky S1 classes in the Library. The other was for the whole S2 Year group! We had to take over the Fuel Zone, and John got everyone started with the topic ‘What would you put on your CV to get the job of a ninja warrior’. Much enthusiastic and very creative writing took place!

Throughout the week, Library helpers promoted our Prize Draw, which was enjoyed by everyone who borrowed, returned or renewed a book in the Library during Book Week Scotland.

We also highlighted some exciting pupil recommended titles including:

Robert Muchamore CHERUB series, and Taran Matharu ‘The Summoner’ series.