Celebrating our different cultures

Hello readers,

April has marked the beginning of our EAL Reading project, supported by the Scottish Government School Library Improvement Fund. We are one of the many Glasgow school libraries taking part, guided by the wonderful Ms DeLeavey – librarian at St Margaret Mary Secondary School and Shawlands Academy – who has tirelessly been working on it.

As school librarians we have also taken part diverse and very informative training by different stakeholders, such as the Glasgow City Council EAL Unit and the Scottish Refugee Library. This solid basis, and the support of Mr Gibson – Knightswood Secondary School EAL teacher – has given Ms Spaltro the right incentive to start the reading club with a group of S2 pupils. But also a multicultural club, ‘Culture Vulture’, co-lead with Miss Di Rollo, German and Spanish teacher.

Since April, the group has largely grown and while we have been all been improving our English – included the librarian – we have also learnt a lot about each other’s cultures; while reading ‘Eagle Warrior’ by Gill Lewis. A great reading for those who seek to know more about Scottish culture and countryside.

Our weekly schedule looks like this: reading group on Wednesdays, and Culture Vulture on Thursdays at lunch, open to everyone. The topics of the club meetings have been: favourite place in Glasgow, different idioms compared, and Fashion in different countries.

Thus far, the pupils’ commitment has been outstanding, but this was only a small part of the whole project. Stay tuned to know what’s boiling in the pot – as we say in Italy!

We’re back!

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Hi there! The blog has been a bit quiet lately as we have been busy producing a shiny new newsletter. Every month, we will be featuring some of the best the library at St. Andrew’s has to offer plus book reviews, events and much much more. Follow the link here for the March edition and here for the April/May edition. We have already had some pupils coming forward to contribute to next months’ edition but we are always looking for more! Email me on gw19mcgregormark@glow.ea.glasgow.sch.uk if you are interested.

Our service will be limited over the coming weeks due to assessments taking place in the library which will make browsing very difficult, if not very close to impossible. But fear not! We still have a click and collect service! Look out for the QR codes around the school or follow this link and fill out a form!

Also, to keep up to date with the very latest goings on in the library, follow us on Twitter! @standrew_schlib

May News

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Hello!

Although the library is mainly closed this month due to SQA assessments taking place, we still have a busy time ahead.

Book Amnesty: Please search high and low for any school library books you may have. Drop them off in the library, when you get a chance, or hand them into your English teacher. Don’t worry if they are reaalllly overdue. You have a good excuse! 🙂

Library Newsletter: Please email me if you have anything you would like to submit to the library newsletter. it can be a book review, drawing, poem, flash fiction – anything considered! My email address is: gw17clarkepamela@glow.sch.uk

EAL Reading Group: We’ve started an EAL Reading Group with some of out S3 pupils, as part of a citywide SLIF funded project. What a great group! Plenty to discuss and some biscuits too. Looking forward to all our upcoming sessions.

World Book Day Competition Winners

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A somewhat overdue post!

World Book Day was a little bit different this year. As it happened during the second lockdown, we couldn’t celebrate in person but that didn’t stop us from taking part. Our two wonderful and very patient(!) competition winners had to wait a wee bit longer than usual to pick up their prizes.

Well done to Charlie & Lara in S1! Charlie won our WBD quiz and Lara won our WBD short story competition. Well-deserved!

It’s Booked!

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Hello and a big welcome back!

Just in case you missed this during lockdown, we have a new library newsletter. Feb and March issues are available and the next issues will come out at the start of May. Keep your eyes peeled! 🙂 I’m really keen to publish pupil work in the newsletter. So if you have any poetry, short stories, book reviews etc. that you’d like to submit, email me – gw17clarkepamela@glow.sch.uk

The links below will take you to the newsletters:

Feb Issue: https://www.flipbookpdf.net/web/site/1b450fcb735fb38b96618c319d80fc89fe8867ff202102.pdf.html

March Issue: https://www.flipbookpdf.net/web/site/1a6ccfedddb86c0b5873bc720afa7d1049eebe31202103.pdf.html

It’s Booked!

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Hello and a big welcome back!

The links below will take you to the newsletters:

Feb Issue: https://www.flipbookpdf.net/web/site/ca6e7467215701c99fb94294e74fd2127bf24c27202102.pdf.html

March Issue: https://www.flipbookpdf.net/web/site/589559ed437cf0aed963f5aba98987c9a5288eeb202103.pdf.html#page/1

Holyrood Library – Spring update

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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!

February and March @Eastbank Academy Library

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In February we celebrated LGBT+ History Month and ran our second writing competition. Our brilliant S6 Literacy Ambassadors were our judges again and chose Brodie C. from S2 as the overall winner! Brodie’s entry was about a drag queen RuPaul Charles and why they are a great role model. You can read Brodie’s entry in a Spring issue of Swatch magazine on page 7!

List of resources for LGBT+ History Month was shared with every student. The list includes tips for fiction and non-fiction books, bookshops to visit around UK, recommended articles to read, a free online zine and links to several organisations that offer help and information.

In March we celebrated World Book Day, every bookworm’s favourite day of the year! Our teachers started a lesson with reading from their favourite book and continued with a number of fun activities. Students guessed famous books from emojis and everyone loved guessing teachers from their bookshelves!

Kate Mallinder, author of two books for teenagers – Asking for a Friend and Summer of No Regrets, recorded a personalised message for us. She shared her tips for reading during lockdown that encouraged and inspired all of us.

Lastly, students were visited by a creative duo Metaphrog, who talked to them about their creative process and importance of reading. Sandra and John from Metaphrog answered pupils’ questions about creating comics, publishing books and many more. Students worked hard on creating their own characters and below you can find some of them. I am very proud of our talented students.