Author Archives: Mr McGregor

February @ St. Andrew’s

February was a great month at St. Andrew’s with some exciting news!

New Look

We have had a make-over! Our new shelving has arrived plus the walls received a much-needed lick of paint. We are still waiting on some new furniture arriving – at which point we will have our official grand re-opening! In the meantime, we have at least been able to welcome both classes and our lunchtime crowd back!

Brian Conaghan

On Tuesday 20th, we also welcomed Brian Conaghan to the school as part of our SLIF project with Renfrew Council. He chatted to our S3s about his life growing up in Coatbridge, his journey in becoming an author and also about his new book, Treacle Town.

March is shaping up to be even busier with two author visits, World Book Day, Woman’s History Month AND British Science Week all coming up!

December/January @ St. Andrew’s

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Happy new year from the librarian and library helpers!

After an excellent Christmas, 2024 looks like it will have a number of excellent things happening in and around the library. Today, we will give you a sneak peak of some of the many new books we have in before giving you some updates as well as our plans for February and beyond.

New Books!

Our new stock is coming in thick and fast! This month we have a number of excellent titles fresh out of the box, including these:

Refurb

The library refurb is officially underway! Unfortunately this means there will be disruptions to the library service over the next couple of weeks but we promise it’ll be worth it! We’ll be sure to throw a big party once it’s done…

Author Visits!

As of next month we will be welcoming a series of authors to come and talk to our S3s as part of a Scottish Government-funded project called Library Young Team! First up, we will be welcoming Brian Conaghan to the school on Tuesday 20th February.

Christmas @ St. Andrew’s

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We hope everyone is looking forward to some well deserved time off over the Christmas Break! In the meantime, here is our display (complete with possibly the smallest Christmas tree in the school) of some of our Christmas and Winter-themed books to tide you over, all hand-picked by our library helpers:

Thanks to all the staff and pupils at St. Andrew’s who have continued to support the library and we hope to have an even better 2024 complete with a shiny new library!

September @ St. Andrew’s

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We’re back for another school year and have lots of things to update everyone on!

Library move/refurb

After our move to English 4, we have moved again! This time to a much larger space. We are currently awaiting a full refurb of the library but once this is done, we look forward to bringing back our full programme of clubs and events – no less the Manga Club! Watch this space for updates.

S1 Inductions

September was a month for meeting and getting to know our new S1s. It was great having them down for their library inductions and there were a lot of keen readers amongst them.

ProQuest/GALE sessions

We are already underway with our research skills workshops as Advanced Higher Drama got their first ProQuest/GALE/Oxford DNB session of the year. We are hoping to continue this with both Social Subjects and English classes next month.

Next Month

October will see us continue with our class borrowing periods for all S1 to S3 pupils and work with S6 paired readers. As the new S1s get their iPads, we are looking to begin Libby/Borrowbox sessions to promote our online resources. October also marks Black History Month (UK) and we will have a pupil-curated display in the library to mark this.

Storytelling for Mental Health project/Book Week Scotland 2022

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November was a very busy month in the library. Not only did we have Book Week Scotland, but we also had a trip to the Mitchell library and our Storytelling Group have also been busy!

Book Week Scotland/Metaphrog trip

Our theme for Book Week Scotland was ‘Scotland’s Stories’ so we decided the best thing to celebrate Scottish stories was to set up a literary map of Scotland! From the Borders to Shetland, the Western Isles to Edinburgh, we displayed a wide range of stories set in Scotland.

We also took the opportunity to take some of our S1s to the Mitchell for a talk and exhibition by Glasgow-based comic artists Metaphrog. Everyone had a great morning and hopefully some budding comic book artists took some inspiration!

Storytelling Group

We also continued our weekly storytelling group this month. Over the last few weeks we had been working with Lego and some other crafty materials to create our own characters. Once we had done this, we then gave them a back story, including a habitat, likes/dislikes and even thought about any quests or antics they would get up to. There were some excellent creations with one of out pupils even drawing out a whole map of their characters’ world!

November updates!

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Welcome back to the Gaelic School blog!

We have had a lot on recently, with more to come in the coming months. Check back here for news on author visits, Book week Scotland and other library-related news.

Storytelling for Mental Health

We are finally underway with our Storytelling group! Over the course of the school year, our group will be engaging in various storytelling-related activities including games, crafts, reading and much much more. Aside from mental health, a key theme of the group is ‘diversity’. We will be giving updates on what the group have been up to here, so don’t miss it!

For our first session, we got everyone to pair off, tell each other an amusing or interesting story about themselves and the other had to re-tell it but be…economical with the truth. It was a lot of fun and we had some excellent stories. As with every session, we get the pupils to describe how they are feeling in one word at the start and end by scanning a QR code (pictured) and entering it into a linked form.

Book Tok display

Introducing our new permanent display: Book Tok! Come down and find some of the top trending books and authors.

St. Andrew’s Wee Write trip!

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Class 1.2 have been excellent users of the library this year. So to reward them, we thought we’d arrange for them to meet a real life author at the Wee Write festival in the Mitchell Library!

We went to a talk/workshop by writer Alex Malarky and, needless to say, everyone had a great time. We listened to Alex talk a bit about her book, including a short reading, and our young people even got the chance to create their own adventure story!

We’ve been a bit quiet recently due to exams going on in the library but please do return for more exciting updates!

Wee Write! @ the Gaelic School!

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This year, the school were involved in two Wee Write! events!

For the first one, we had Johan Nic a’Ghobiann visit the school to give a talk to our S2s:

We also went with our S1s to the Mitchell for an event with illustrator Chris Mould who talked about his new illustrated version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. He also gave us plenty of tips to improve our own drawing skills.

(apologies for the poor quality photos!)

Watch this space for my exciting updates next month!

LGBTQ+ History Month @ Sgoil Ghàidhlig Ghlaschu!

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Hi and welcome to our LGBTQ+ History special!

As you can see, we have displayed some excellent books which deal with LGBT themes or feature leading LGBT characters or protagonists. Some are more ‘obvious’ than others, but we hope there is something for everyone here!

Thanks to the LGBTQ+ group for their suggestions! There were some that even caught the librarian off-guard! We have put up some posters (see below) of some of their recommendations. If you can’t find them in the library, most are available on the Libby app (email gwmcgregormark@glow.ea.glasgow.sch.uk if you need more info on this!). We are always looking for more recommendations so please get in touch if you have any that haven’t been mentioned here.

The next update will be for World Book Day on March 3rd. We are hoping to have quizzes, giveaways and much more!

February @ St. Andrew’s!

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Hi everyone! Welcome to our first full month of normal service!

This month is LGBT History Month and we have a display of some great books which relate to LGBTQ+ issues or contain LGBTQ+ characters and protagonists. It’s a very eclectic mix and some are more ‘obvious’ than others, but we hope that there is something for everyone. Plus, there is a free rainbow bookmark with every book borrowed!

This month also brings us Languages Week Scotland as well as International Mother Language Day so what better time to set up our new Community Languages Section! We have a number of new books in French, Polish, Italian, Spanish and Arabic (most of which didn’t last long before pupils snapped them up!). We are hoping to have more in the not-so-distant future but we reckon this is a good start! Also special thanks to our EAL group for creating a new multilingual. ‘Welcome’ sign for the library.

3rd March is World Book Day and we have lots of exciting things planned, including a book cover competition, a book swap and much more. Our next update will be a WBD special so keep your eyes pealed!