Chatterbooks group library visit

Yesterday afternoon, 16 children from the Year Five Chatterbooks group visited Gorleston Library. It was the first time that a lot of them had been to a public library and they were very excited. They listened carefully while the librarian talked to them about the different services that a library has to offer and then spent some time choosing books from the shelves. Some of the group took home up to ten books. Several chose non-fiction books about dangerous animals and quite a few picked graphic novels. When they got back to school, they talked to the rest of Year 5 about their visit. Now everybody is keen to join the library- hooray!

 

 

An exciting week!

This week we were lucky enough to have two extremely influential sets of visitors come and work with us at Moorlands.

On Wednesday we were joined Miranda McKearney OBE, who created The Reading Agency, and Craig Hill. They are both focusing their energies on a new project, Empathy Lab. We are pleased to be one of only 12 schools in the country trialling this project. The focus is on using books and stories to improve children's empathy skills. We talked about a lot of exciting ideas, including creating Empathy Detectives and Book Spotters, as well as using Empathy Mentors around the school. We're now going to create an action plan to ensure that it all gets done! We'll be meeting with Miranda and her team again in a few months to share our progress alongside the other 11 schools involved.

On Friday we were delighted to host a training day delivered by Rob Smith, the genius behind The Literacy Shed website. He spend the whole day sharing inspirational ways to use film and images in the classroom to help improve children's writing. There were about 20 teachers there from about five schools, and it was wonderful to see such a buzz of excitement and enthusiasm in the room. Rob is a really entertaining speaker, with a wealth of knowledge about teaching English, and the general consensus was that it was one of the most useful training sessions in a very long time!

Reading with Reception

This week the pupils in Year 5 started daily story time sessions with the children in Reception. Every day, two children go down to the story area and read them a selection of their favourite books. This term we're linking some of the stories to loneliness and how it feels to be lonely, which is the focus of our EmpathyLab work. James and Marley enjoyed reading The Smartest Giant In Town and Eat Your Peas, and the Reception children loved listening to them.

     

School Reading Council

Our School Reading Council held its first meeting this week. The children had lots of ideas about how to get children and staff excited about reading in the school. Some of the suggestions that came up were:

• Lead a special assembly where they could talk about favourite books and why they love reading. Also ask the teachers what their favourite books are.
• Have a 'Reader of the Week' in each class where the child gets to wear a special badge.
• Write a regular column about books and reading for the school newsletter and the village magazine.
• Have a School Reading Council display board for book reviews, posters, etc.
• Film interviews with the staff about reading to put on the school website. Mr Lee has volunteered to be first, although he doesn't know it yet.
• Discuss which authors and poets we would like to visit the school over the next year or so.
• Create a class 'wishlist' of books that children would like for the new library.
• Become Book Spotters for our EmpathyLab project, where we look out for children's books about loneliness.

We've got our next meeting in a week or so where we'll decide what we're going to focus on first.



Book Judges for the Peter's Junior Book Awards

We were delighted to be asked to be part of the judging panel for the Peters Junior Book Awards. It's really exciting, because we love reading and all wanted to be involved.

Our judging panel

"I really wanted to be a judge because I love reading and I like learning about different authors. It is a chance to read new books that I won't usually get the opportunity to read." Marley

"I wanted to be a judge because you get the chance to read really good books and talk about them with the other judges and people from different schools." Isobel

"I like reading because of all the different books and being a judge means I can read as much as I want." Taylor

There are ten books on the shortlist that we are working our way through. You can find out much more about the Awards by visiting the Norfolk SLS blog. The books are:

Not as We Know It by Tom Avery

Illustrated by Kate Grove

How to Fight a Dragon’s Fury by Cressida Cowell 

Demolition Dad by Phil Earle

Illustrated by Sara Ogilvie

How to Fly with Broken Wings by Jane Elson

The Pirates of Pangaea by Daniel Hartwell

Illustrated by Neill Cameron

The Marvels by Brian Selznick

The Cake, the Wolf and the Witch by Maudie Smith

Illustrated by Tony Ross

My Brother is a Superhero by David Solomons

Illustrated by Laura Ellen Anderson

Hamish and the Worldstoppers by Danny Wallace

Illustrated by Jamie Littler

Return to the Secret Garden by Holly Webb

Our questions for authors and poets

Here are three questions that we would love you to answer.

1. What was your favourite book as a child?
2. Is there a book or poem that you wish you had written?
3. Why do you love reading?

Thank you for answering, please post your answers in the comments box below.