Tag Archives: Reading Schools

Holyrood Secondary – Reading Schools Gold Award

Holyrood Secondary has achieved Reading Schools Gold Accreditation. What a fantastic journey we’ve had!

Well done to every single young person, member of staff and parent who has been involved in promoting and celebrating reading. Thank you to our partners in the community : Glasgow Zine Library, and Govanhill Library. Huge thanks to Scottish Book Trust for supporting us on this journey, and providing the framework enabling us to mark off all our achievements while having fun with reading.

We’ve had many adventures such as Chapter Chats Book Group and Podcast, Zine Making Workshops, coffee mornings, whole school Read Around the World, author visits, Poetry at Hampden Bowling Club, and boundless energy and ideas from pupil helpers and Duke of Edinburgh Volunteers who have championed reading throughout. At the heart of it all has been enjoying and celebrating reading and getting the right book into the right hands of our wonderful keen readers. We’ve been reading in the library, in classrooms, in the fuel zone, in the playground, at home, on holiday. Books can be enjoyed everywhere, anytime.

The Reading Schools programme, developed by Scottish Book Trust, is an accreditation programme for schools that are committed to building a reading culture for their learners and communities. The programme supports schools to build a reading culture, where every pupil is encouraged to feed their imagination through books. There are three levels of accreditation – Core, Silver and Gold. Reading Schools – Scottish Book Trust

We’ve had an amazing time, and can heartily recommend Reading Schools to anyone who wants to celebrate reading, with plenty of help on hand from Scottish Book Trust.

Chapter Chats Podcast

At Holyrood, our Chapter Chats Book Group is attempting a Podcast! This is part of our Reading Schools journey. We’re all very excited, and we’ve had lots of help and support from all round the school. Mrs. Panaretou from the Music Dept. has shown us how to use Garage Band and lent us special recording equipment. Bilal in S6 is our sound engineer.

Setting up for recording

Chapter Chats was set up in 2023, as a book group “for all Busy Bookers in Holyrood, to openly recommend and rant about what you are reading”. We love doing this! We have 9 regular members, and we’ve met for special recording sessions 3 times – in September/ October.

Mr. McGrath and Bilal have hosted the podcasts. We could talk about books all day, so we’ve tried various things to keep on track, such as Quick Fire questions. It’s been so much fun, and we’ve learned lots about each other’s favourite books, and new genres to try.

Some of our Podcast crew

Our Book Group founder members, now in S5

Our next step is working out how to publish our Podcast. We’re looking at various options, and also looking at good practice from other schools throughout Scotland. Our Podcast will be available soon.

Ms Kindness

St Roch’s Reads: May

St Roch’s reading leadership group has been working hard this year towards gaining a Reading School accreditation.  One of the group aims was to think of new ways to encourage pupils to discuss and share books they’ve enjoyed. Inspired by a Literacy Trust idea, we decided to make a Recommendation Tree.

The tree is on a noticeboard in the English corridor so pupils can easily see it was they move about school. The leadership group put lots of work in making the tree, cutting out templates and making colourful collection boxes for classrooms.  Teachers have been encouraging pupils to add a recommended read as part of their library visits and class reading time. It’s lovely to see the tree growing new leaves this term! If you’re curious about what our pupils are reading or are looking for a new book, here’s a few favourites that have been shared this month. Well done to all the pupil helpers who made and maintain the tree particularly Iman, Amany, Roya, Millie & Jodie. Great work folks!

 

Bookweek @ St Rochs

Book Week Scotland 2024

Book Week is an annual celebration of books and reading that takes place every November across Scotland. Book Week Scotland 2024 took place on 18–24 November- here’s how we celebrated in St Roch’s School Library. 

Book Hunting

Our first years took part in a book scavenger hunt! First everyone played a quick Blooket quiz to refresh our learning about how the library is organised. Then we split into teams and got mission cards. The challenge was to find the books on your mission card and be the quickest to complete all 14. All the teams were fantastic, they all finished the challenge and we were very impressed by how speedy some were! 

How to choose a book

We held a session on book choosing for second and third year classes. Sometimes pupils struggle to find the ‘right’ book for them when they visit the library and it can be a bit stressful. We want to make sure that everyone can leave the library with something they’ll enjoy for their class personal reading time. 

For this session, pupils learned some simple strategies to help with choosing a book. Then we split into groups to complete a’ reading personality’ quiz which helped pupils to narrow down a couple of genres/library sections that might suit them.  It was a good bit of fun which gave pupils some helpful pointers (some people were definitely surprised by their ‘personality’ result!). Want to find your reading personality? The quiz is available here as part of Scottish Book Trust’s Reading Schools resources .  

Guiding Lights

Lastly, library volunteers lead by chief display planner Iman, did a great job on a lovely Book Week Display.

This year’s theme is hope and the volunteers chose to focus their display on  Guiding Lights – a celebration of characters who give us strength, guidance and inspire us to keep us going. Volunteers made some great choices of books, including The sad ghost club by Lize Meddings, Punching the air by Ibi Zoboi & Yusef Salaam, and When stars are scattered by Victoria Jamieson & Omar Mohamed.

Well done volunteers! And a big thank you for all your help with the activities this week.

Lastly every year, people accross the country share stories as part of the ‘Scotland’s Stories’ campaign. Scottish Book trust include a handful of favourites in a free book for Book Week Scotland. You can order a free copy of this year’s collection ‘Hope’ now from the SBT website.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

The Reading Schools Committee have been busy starting the library Christmas decorations. We have window displays and also the 3rd year of the Annual Hyndland Library Christmas Book Tree 🎄 Excited to see how this years turns out! Will keep you all updated.. 🎅

Getting into the Christmas spirit!

Baubles!

Snowflakes and Angels

Happy Hanukkah!

3rd year is a charm

Eastbank goes book bonkers

Welcome back to school Eastbank !  It has been a lonely library without you all.  Can you believe our library actually looks this big?  Isn’t it weird looking at it without any pupils in?

New Feature – Click the link.  In our blog posts now, if you click on any underlined text, you’ll be taken to some exciting new internet content.  This could be a book review or even an author’s page.  So there’s lots more for you to explore in the blog this year.

S1 Induction Time   It’s great to see all the new S1 pupils come into the library for the first time this month.  Everyone has now been given their library cards and can borrow books for the first time.  Remember, the library is free and you can borrow books for 2 weeks, or longer if you need more time to read the books you have.  But remember to bring them back !!  Stuck for an idea what to read?  Why not check out our display of new books?  This table is where you find a selection of new books covering all subjects.

Creation Corner

Don’t forget about the other activities you can do in the library.  Our creation corner has been very popular this month, with a gratitude rainbow, a brilliant Mickey Mouse drawing and a good few filled in word searches, I’ve been blown away with what you’re doing.  You could see your work here if you hand it in to Mrs Marshall !

New books to borrow 

On the new releases table, you can find the following books.  As a sneak peak, click on the links and you will be able to read all about them !  If you want a book, just ask the librarian who will be happy to reserve one for you.

Echostar is Always Listening  Definitely the creepiest of the new books, and a great read to set you up for Halloween in October !  It’s not ghosts and ghouls, it’s even scarier than that.  Ruby and her best friend have discovered a new AI tool which helps them get great grades at school.  But is that just too good to be true?  Read this Super Short story and find out….

EchoStar: Is Always Listening

The Final Year 

Matt Goodfellow has done it again with this book, he simply gets better and better.  Nathan is struggling at school, and trying his best to keep the few friends he has. The Final Year But what if your best friend starts doing things they shouldn’t really be doing?  And it’s serious.  Combined with trouble at home, the Final Year is a great read and one you can identify with concerning your first year at a new school.

 

 

 Unfamiliar  Unfamiliar What an amazing reader request has just come in to Eastbank.  The graphic novel of Unfamiliar and it’s follow up have arrived.  An adorable wee witch – Planchette – moves into a haunted house together with her familiar Marlow.  Not a problem for a witch you’d think !  But a bargain haunted house throws up some funny problems for the young witch and her familiar.  A cosy read about insiders, outsiders and all those in-between, there’s not much you can’t love about Unfamiliar.  Ask Mrs Marshall to reserve both copies if you want double the fun.

Author of the Month – Tom Palmer 

Our first author of the month for this term is Tom Palmer.  Tom writes amazing books on football, the Second World War and many other things.  His books are in our Super Shorts section, which means they are a great read with not so many pages.  Also they have yellow pages which means pupils with dyslexia challenges can read the words with more ease.  But everyone can borrow these books and they are amazing reads

 

March in St Paul’s

March was an extremely busy month in the library. We had various World Book Day events and two amazing author sessions. Let’s have a look 😊

World Book Day 2024

The library was very busy during the week of World Book Day. We had a book themed Scavenger Hunt, a Big Book Quiz and an Easter basket full of goodies that was raffled off to teachers. All of the events were organised and ran by our Senior Literacy Ambassadors. Congratulations go to them, they did an absolutely fantastic job 🥰

Winners of the scavenger hunt

Big Book Quiz

Easter Basket Winner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Visits

During March the library hosted not one but two fabulous author visits. The first author was Hiba Noor Khan talking about her book ‘Safiyyah’s War’

Hiba talking about Safiyyah’s War

Our second author visit was from Brian Conaghan talking about his book ‘Treacle Town’. Brian’s visit was part of the Library Young Team Project supported by the Scottish Library Improvement Fund.

Brian Conaghan talking about his book Treacle Town