I always say that the best part of this job is opening up boxes of new books. Six boxes appeared on Monday filled with YA novels, junior fiction and non-fiction. There’s also lots of new graphic novels and manga as requested by the GN&M Club. Needless to say, these flew off the shelf and soon as they got their hands on them. Some very happy young people 🙂
Just some of the new books…
I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year and found time to relax with a good book!
We have largely been closed since we came back from the break to accommodate prelims. However, we can still provide books! Aside from reintroducing the class boxes – a bespoke selection of books for each class – we are also bringing back our click and collect service. Click on this link, fill in the form, and collect your book!
Alternatively, we have QR codes dotted around the school and also on our Twitter page which will also take you to the form.
There are a
lso vast selections of eBooks and Audiobooks available on Libby and BorrowBox – both of which are available on your iPads. You’ll need your library card number or your PIN, so if you don’t have those then email me at gw19mcgregormark@glow.ea.glasgow.sch.uk
More updates in February where we will be back up and running to full capacity plus the return of the Manga Club, the EAL reading group and other exciting events!
Hello Readers,
Hope you have had a lovely winter break and have taken full advantage of the time off.
The library has been very busy planning and hosting one of our wonderful events in December – post about it coming soon! While we were working hard to provide a lovely event, our Library Newsletter editors pulled together another great issue.
You can check it out at this link: Book Creator – Library Newsletter – December 2021
A massive thank you to our Molly and Jude for their
hard work!
Happy Reading!
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!
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!
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].
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.
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!
Hello!
This year our great Library Team will host a bookish event every month.
The fir
st planned was Hobbit Day Celebration on Wednesday, 22nd September.
Each library assistants has helped to make it a great success:
On the event day,in small teams we have solved Gollum’s riddles, looking for clues around the library, and completing a related crossword. We were very busy, but it was lovely to see so many young people adventuring in a new book genre, socializing and having fun.
Here are our event winners!
Do not worry, though, as we are already working on the next event!
In May, we were very lucky to be part of STEM Equals project, supported by the Scottish Government School Library Improvement Fund.
The project started with our 3 researchers visiting from the University of Strathclyde– Lauren, Atimati and Richard introducing themselves and talking about their life as students of Biomedical Engineering, Electronic and Electrical Engineering and Physics.
Our S1 class compared Paisley’s annual rainfall data and explored how this data is relevant for understanding climate change with the help of researchers. Pupils drew graphs and looked for weather patterns and trends. We talked about who can be a scientist (everyone!) and what is Citizen Science.
Pupils did two experiments – identifying plastics and plant water sensor using micro:bits.
Lastly, our S1 pupils got a remote visit from Gill Lewis, who is a children’s author, vet and wildlife enthusiast. She wrote over 20 books about animals and environmental issues and many pupils were already familiar with her books, especially White Dolphin. In her video, Gill explained why books are important, why arts are important to science and even taught us to speak Gorilla!
The school library received almost 50 new books (thank you SLIC and Miss Clarke, a school librarian from All Saints Secondary School and Lochend Community High School!) and we created a new display to tie in with the project.
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Jules Scheele (they/them) are a Glasgow-based illustrator, comics artist and graphic facilitator whose art focuses strongly on mental health, queerness, activism and community. They created many personal zines, but most notably illustrated books Queer: A Graphic History, Gender: A Graphic Guide and Sexuality: A Graphic Guide.
Jules recorded a video talk for our S3 pupils and school LGBT+ club, where they talked about the history of zines, their journey to becoming an illustrator, showed us how to make a simple zine by using only A4 paper and scissors and answered pupils’ questions that were everything from “Who do you hope to reach with your art?” to “What advice would you give to your teenage self”.
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Smithycroft Library won a Toppsta competition for the best display using new Angie Thomas’ book Concrete Rose and won two more copies of the book! I can’t wait for pupils to read this prequel to the bestselling book The Hate U Give and tell me what they think!
Thank you everyone for this school year and see you in the next one! 🙂
Thank you Helpers!
Here’s a round up of some of the fun we’ve had in May/ June:
Most days start with a “Good Morning” on library Teams. We check in with each other and make sure everyone is having a good day.
We enjoyed fun quizzes for ‘Earth Day’, and ‘Oceans Day’, finding out which animals each of us resembles!
On Empathy Day we chatted about empathy and how we can look out for each other. We put up a book display of Self-help books, and recommended our favourite authors.
“I recommend self-help books because it does a lot of good for my mental health and self-esteem. I really like the author Fearne Cotton. She uses examples that I can relate to” (S3 Pupil)
We made a Book display for Euro 2021, and prepared books to give to our visiting P7 pupils.
Our Library Helpers have been fantastic, whether helping with book displays, activities, or just chilling out with friends,
Thank you so much to everyone who has borrowed books, helped out either in person or on library Teams or simply just been there for company. Thanks also to Laraib and Fiza our Duke of Edinburgh helpers. You have all been amazing!
Can’t wait to see everyone next year and have even more fun.
Bon Voyage!
