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!
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:Â https://www.flipbookpdf.net/web/site/1b450fcb735fb38b96618c319d80fc89fe8867ff202102.pdf.html
March Issue:Â https://www.flipbookpdf.net/web/site/1a6ccfedddb86c0b5873bc720afa7d1049eebe31202103.pdf.html
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/ca6e7467215701c99fb94294e74fd2127bf24c27202102.pdf.html
March Issue:Â Â https://www.flipbookpdf.net/web/site/589559ed437cf0aed963f5aba98987c9a5288eeb202103.pdf.html#page/1
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!
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.
To make sure everyone was included in World Book Day, our amazing English Department set up a Blind Date with a Book for all members of staff.
PS. Anyone wishing to read more in 2021 (and beyond), check out this padlet for my tips and tricks!
Hello readers,
Last January, our school was successful in receiving a great economical support from the First Minister’s Reading Challenge – Creative Workshop Fund. Yey!
This has made our wish – to boost our pupils’ creative writing confidence – true! As in the best stories, there have been some issues; once on top of everything a massive national lockdown!
No worries though, our team was extremely committed to offer the best to our learners… Several phone calls and Teams meeting after, we were able to arrange four (yes, F-O-U-R!) sessions with Rossie Stone from Dekkocomics!
Yesterday we had our second session and we have seen our pupils’ engagement grew massively! Rossie has inspired us to always do our best, and that an easy way to do it is to find the enjoyable side of what we are doing. Our pupils felt confident enough to write and draw their own beautiful stories! To give you and idea, these are some of the stories we have had: a football team playing in the Ibrox stadium, a young person learning the importance of rules, and a young dancer following her dream.
What’s next?
We still have two more sessions to go, and we really hope that at least one of them will be in person. And then… Our wonderful pupils’ stories will be pulled together and printed in a book for them to take home!
So far, we couldn’t be any prouder of our young people for the resilience they shown undertaking a series of online webinars. We also want to express our deep gratitude to all the school staff who has been involved and to the Fist Minister’s Reading Challenge for giving us this opportunity.
Hopefully, we will be able to share more about this project later on!
World Book Day 2021 took place on Thursday 4 March. But Glasgow’s School Librarians decided to celebrate it all week long. I’ve collected everything we put together in this blog post. I hope you enjoy it!
Every year, you can get books for free with a £1 book token. Your English teachers have some of the book tokens, but you can also get them at the library once you’re back in school. Because of lockdown, the tokens are also available to download this year. Go to the Library Team, to the General Channel, and read the post It’s World Book Day! You can read more about the books at this link: https://www.worldbookday.com/books/.
You have until the end of the day on Wednesday 10 March to email the librarian your guesses for the Guess the Shelf competition. The bookshelves belong to staff across Lourdes Secondary – some are from their homes, others are from their classrooms. Can you guess who owns which shelf? Good luck! https://bit.ly/3rlbvDQ.
The theme of World Book Day 2021 is Share A Story. So the Glasgow School Librarians came together on Teams last week to share their current reads. We put our recommendations together in a flip book, with help from library pets and cuddly toys. Which ones have you read? https://bit.ly/38ictcc.
The librarian at Bellahouston Academy and Rosshall Academy made five flip books celebrating the themes in all the £1 books available for World Book Day, one for every day of the week. You’ll find lots of information, book lists, and some quizzes to test yourselves.
Day1: https://online.flipbuilder.com/kczr/sjce/. Some World Book Day books are about the environment, so if you’re passionate about saving the earth, this is the flipbook for you.
Day 2: https://online.flipbuilder.com/kczr/byid/. Like science-fiction and superheroes? You should read this flipbook to get some new book recommendations.
Day 3: https://online.flipbuilder.com/kczr/pefh/. This flipbook is a homage to all things detective and crime. You’ll discover famous literary detectives who have been around for decades and the new generations of young detectives.
Day 4: https://online.flipbuilder.com/kczr/oivi/. This particular flipbook about Fantasy fiction was partially inspired by the adventures of the School Librarians D&D Group.
Day 5: https://online.flipbuilder.com/kczr/nzcg/. We’re ending the week with a celebration of the football books available from your school library.
