In the final push to the Easter Break, March has been a busy and exciting month, filled with fun activities from start to finish – enjoy!

World Book Day

The month started off with our World Book Day activities!  All our pupils were given their £1 book tokens to spend on free World Book Day books, but pupils also had the chance to win these books in our competitions and games for World Book Day!  Pupils were invited to write 50-word short stories on the theme of ‘World’, and came along to our annual WBD Mystery Game in the library!

This year, while doing its World Tour for World Book Day, the Best Book in the World was stolen!  The thief hid clues in books around the library that pupils had to find and solve to discover where the book had been taken.  The pupils transformed into detectives and were immediately on the case!  In one lunch break, pupils were able to find all the clues, solve all the puzzles, and discover that the Best Book in the World had been taken to Peru!  Everyone who took part received a free World Book Day book!

Our Clubs:

Find out what our clubs got up to this month:

Comic Club

We’ve been practicing our comic skills this month with some Quick Comic sessions.  Pupils needed to draw in under 2 minutes a randomly generated character and scene.  Highlights include the confused robots in ballgowns in a castle, happy alien clowns at bus stops, and angry people in library (the most unrealistic IMO).

EAL Book Club

We have started drafting our Cinderella stories!  I don’t want to give away any spoilers, because the group is very excited about their stories and keeping them private for now (they may have taken their jotters home over the Easter break to keep working/so I can’t take a peek) but there has been discussion of gender-swapping, murder mysteries, and stories of revenge!

RPG Club

Let the games begin!  Our pupils have started playing a Dungeons and Dragons style campaign called A Battle of Bookwyrms (I may have created a book themed game – this is a library club after all!).  Their characters were sent invitations to an unknown place, and under the promise of adventure and riches, they all chose to go, meeting for the first time.  However, when they arrived at their destination, they were led into an arena and ambushed!  The brave party were able to fight their way out and have now been offered a job.  What job could it be?  Find out next month!

Our Volunteers

Our volunteers have continued working hard to make the library a great space for everyone.  Staff and pupils have responded well to their great Genre displays made this month, one for Romance and one for Mystery books, our most popular genres!  There’s a big project on the horizon for our volunteers after the holidays, and I’m thrilled with how they have helped to make the library such a fun and exciting space within our school!

Easter Egg Hunt

[I know this one technically happened in April but it’s too fun to leave until next month!]

Our library mascot Bellamy was joined by a couple of mischievous chicks on the last day of school, who then hid Easter Eggs all through the library!  Our pupils then got to enjoy an Easter Egg Hunt and the sweet chocolatey taste of success after!  A very fun note on which to end the term!

To see everything that April has to offer, check out the latest edition of our newsletter – Bookmarked!

That was a cold one!

I don’t want to jinx it, but fingers crossed that the weather heats up a little as we head into Spring.

Until then, however, you can browse this library update with everything we got up to in February!

RPG Club

Due to popular demand from our pupils, we have now started a brand-new RPG Club (that’s role-playing-game for the novices amongst us).  Pupils have been working this month on creating their own Dungeons & Dragons characters, and we’ll hopefully be starting our first campaign soon!  The character creation process has been very involved, and actually temporarily taken over our Comic Club too!  However, character creation is an important part of the comic-making process so it’s all relevant!  Next month our pupils will have transformed into bards, warlocks, rangers and sorcerer’s ready to dive into as yet unknown fantasy worlds!  Keep updated with their progress in this blog.  This will be my first time as Dungeon Master and the pupils first time playing so we’ll all be learning something new while we play!

EAL Book Club

Project Cinderella continues!  Our pupils have now finished reading the three best known and classic versions of the story from France (by Charles Perrault), Italy (by Giambattista Basile) and Germany (by The Grimm Brothers).  They have been plotting their mind maps and jotting down ideas for their own twist on the story.  Now we are looking at and discussing modern adaptations of the story!  We have started with Cinderella Is Dead, by Kalynn Bayron, a dark feminist fantasy retelling that explores Cinderella’s choice in the story, and Gender Swapped Fairy Tales, by Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett, looking at how changing gender could change the story.  We are all agreed – glass trainers are probably more comfortable than glass heels, but still entirely impractical.

Volunteers

Our library volunteers have formed a great wee team and have been working hard in the library throughout February.  They have helped create great displays, such as this one for LGBT+ History Month, and have done their best to make sure the library stays tidy and organised.  I am very grateful for all their help!

One of our volunteers has gone above and beyond, and has made a new mascot for the library – please meet Bellamy Book Bear!  Bellamy is now a part of the library team and has loads of book suggestions (such as these ‘beary’ good bear-themed books (and yes, you can expect a lot more un’bear’able puns from me!)).

Blind Date With A Book

For Valentine’s Day, the library had a Blind Date With A Book display!  Pupils were able to read the first line of a book, and a couple bullet points of information about it, before borrowing, and plenty of pupils got involved!  It might not have always been love at first line, but we had fun either way! 

March is set to be another exciting month, now that we have four clubs on the go and World Book Day to celebrate!  You can check out everything that’s coming up in the March edition of Bookmarked – the school library newsletter.  

A brief December update:

We’ve finally reached the winter holiday, and we can now all rest, relax (and obviously read) for a couple weeks.  Our pupils have worked hard and been incredibly creative this last month, with pupils trying out a variety of Christmas paper crafts, such as baubles, crackers, snowflakes, trees and stars – all of which have helped to decorate our wonderful “Book-mas” tree! There have also been lots of senior pupils studying hard in the library for their upcoming prelim – good luck to all those hard workers! 

Our clubs have also been having lots of fun and games this month, with plenty of games of hangman and pictionary on comic and fairy tale themes.  Our comic club also introduced Miss West (the librarian (me)) to Blookit and have had a great time playing games and quizzes with comic and manga characters.  I’m looking forward to all our clubs gathering again in the new year, and hopefully with more clubs to come!

I hope everyone has a merry Christmas, happy holidays and a happy new year!

We’ve had an especially bookish month in the library!  Our clubs have been having lots of fun and showing off their skills, we got excited about COP26, and most of all we celebrated Book Week Scotland!

Book Week Scotland

For BWS this year, the library ran a ‘Wee Stories’ competition, and challenged pupils to submit short stories of no more than 50 words to the school library newsletter, Bookmarked.  Here are some of our top entries:

I woke up from a nightmare, dreaming that I got killed in my sleep, sweat dripping from my forehead.  I tried to control my breathing.  “But it felt so real”.  My hands shake as I get up from my bed.  I stretch, look down and see my cold, dead body.  – Murron, S3

I opened my eyes to find myself in the middle of the road.  There was no cars coming my way.  The traffic lights were rusty.  The shop windows were broken.  The world seemed quiet and empty.  The machine worked but they all left.  How was I going to go back? – Flora, S3

One cold winter night I’m walking my cat out on a lead until she saw a squirrel and she wanted to eat it but I didn’t let her off the lead so she got mad and scratched me and then I turned into Catman! – Dylan, S3

You can check out all the best Wee Stories from our pupils in the December issue of Bookmarked at the end of this post.  All pupils who submitted a story were entered into a raffle to win a £10 National Book Token!

Clubs Update

Our clubs have been having lots of fun this month, especially during Book Week Scotland, when our Big Book Quiz returned, geared specifically to our Comic Club and EAL Book Clubs.

The Comic Club took part in the Big Comic Book Quiz, and our members were quizzed on their knowledge of comics, graphic novels and manga, with rounds about book covers, characters, movie & TV adaptations, blurbs and emoji-titles.  It was a fierce competition, our members are very knowledgeable about their favourite books! Congratulations go to this great S1 pupil, who not only won this quiz, but also emerged victorious of an even harder manga quiz later in the month! 

Our EAL Book Club also had their own quiz, the Big Fairy Tale Book Quiz, inspired by our Project Cinderella!  This quiz involved Disney characters, modern fairy tale adaptations, different versions of Cinderella, translating fairy tale titles from their original languages and finally a scavenger hunt through the library to find Cinderella!  Once again, a very close competition between our pupils.  This month we have also continued to read and discuss Cinderella stories – the current theory from the group is that Cinderella is actually a witch!  [This project is supported by the Scottish Government School Library Improvement Fund].

COP26

The school was buzzing with talk of COP26 and fighting climate change, and in the library we helped to encourage these discussions!  We have posters suggesting 2 minute challenges for staff and pupils to try and become more eco-friendly, and we had this massive display of books on climate change and sustainable living available to borrow throughout the conference (and beyond!), helping all our curious pupils to understand what was happening and why.

Want to see what’s coming up in December?  Check out the latest issue of Bookmarked, the JPA Library Newsletter, at this link.

Hello again from the John Paul Academy Library!

In October, we were delighted to receive our prize from the Penguin Books Lit In Colour Book Giveaway!  The library has received an incredible donation of over 100 books written by authors of colour to help diversify our collection and inspire our pupils and staff.  These books are now on display in the library and available for our staff and pupils to borrow.  Pupils have already started borrowing some of the YA fiction, and Michelle Obama’s biography has been incredibly popular! 

Our comic club have been talking about all their favourite graphic novels and manga, and have made posters to advertise their favourites to the rest of the school.  Here’s one for Hilda and the Troll, which was bought for the library after our shopping session in September.  Since starting the club, our group has read over 20 books! 

Our S3 EAL Book Club has made some good progress with Project Cinderella.  We’ve finished the classic Perrault version that inspired the Disney animated classic, and moved on to ‘The Cat Cinderella’ by Giambattista Basile, considered to be the first written version of the story from Italy in 1634.  This one is very different from the famous Disney version, as Cinderella commits a terrible crime to start, and then is faced with not 2 but 6 stepsisters!  Our club members are definitely intrigued by the prospect of creating a villainous Cinderella story… [This project is supported by the Scottish Government School Library Improvement Fund].

In November we have Book Week Scotland to look forward to, which will involve displays, a ‘Wee Story’ competition, games and more!  For this and everything else coming in November, check out the latest edition of Bookmarked, our school library newsletter.

Happy reading from Miss West

It’s been a fun start to the year in the library at John Paul Academy.  The library is open again for pupils to borrow books after months of lockdowns and restrictions.  The new S1 cohort have loved coming to the library to check out books, with hundreds of books borrowed since we returned to school after the summer holidays!

We have lots of very enthusiastic readers in the new S1 group and it’s great to see them in the library every day picking out new books to read.  They are especially fond of our manga collection, and have put in several requests for more – keep your eyes peeled for new titles coming soon!

Our S3 EAL Book Club, every Wednesday at lunchtime, has just begun Project Cinderella!  Every week our club will read a different version of the Cinderella story, taken from different times and places.  Once we’ve finished, we’re going to write our own version of the story!  We started this month with Charles Perrault’s classic version of the story, famous for the Disney animation.  Watch this space to see the club progress, and ideas for our own version of the story!  [This project is supported by the Scottish Government School Library Improvement Fund].

The library has also started up a new Comic Club, for fans of comics, graphic novels and especially manga!  Our new comic club members have had a library takeover, helping to choose new comics, graphic novels and manga to buy for the library, and have created this fantastic display with some of their favourite options for their fellow pupils to borrow!  Some of their notes included “This book is really interesting” and “Join our comic club for awesome books like these!”. Our club meets every Monday at lunchtime, and is open for more members to join in! 

Pupils have also been getting creative with our new Craft Cart!  So far pupils have tried their hand at paper cranes and origami bookmarks, as well as creating and drawing their own posters and characters.

If you want to see what’s coming up in October, then check out Bookmarked, the JPA Library newsletter, at this link.

Thanks for reading, and watch this space for future updates! 

Book Week Scotland is always an exciting time in any library, and especially welcome in 2020! We weren’t able to celebrate in the library as we normally would (such as last years Books and Bubbles Party!) but there was still plenty happening over the week online!

The theme of Book Week Scotland this year was ‘Future’, which inspired some of the activities we had during the week.  While pupils weren’t able to come to the library and see our BWS display, featuring books set in the future, pupils were able to browse a virtual display!  These virtual displays have helped to bring the library to pupils digitally, and Book Week Scotland was a great opportunity to show off what the library has to offer!  That being said, looking at the books, the future would appear to be… unwelcoming…

The library also hosted a competition throughout November, inviting all pupils to share their stories of the future! There were some great responses, with top stories published in our December newsletter.  Much like our ‘future’ fiction, our pupils envisage a bleak future for us all…

Book Week Scotland is a great time to get more involved in reading and writing, so pupils were given the opportunity to check out author talks, featuring some of their favourite authors such as David Walliams, Liz Pichon and Malorie Blackman!  The great news is that these videos are available all year from Authors Live on Demand, which means pupils will always have the opportunity to learn more about their favourite books from their favourite authors (which is my way of saying if you haven’t checked it out yet – you should!)

The biggest hit of the week was our JPA Big Book Quiz!  With a £10 National Book Token up for grabs, and a new round of the quiz every day, our pupils were quick to test their bookish knowledge throughout the week!  The quiz rounds covered book covers (image), first lines, movie adaptations, blurbs and emoji titles!  Lots of pupils entered, making for a fierce competition, ultimately won by S1 pupil Shrika with a very impressive score of 26/30 points, narrowly beating the competition to win the prize! It was wonderful to see how well our pupils know their books!

Hopefully in the future – or rather, next year – we can celebrate Book Week Scotland in the library again.  Either way, the Big Book Quiz will definitely be making a comeback in 2021, so start your preparations now and READ! READ! READ!