Woah there, September!

Blog post

So here it is, another September. Once again one of my targets for this year is to get back to regular blogging, with the added incentive that this year I’m bribing myself with Twixes, so it should actually work.

There’s a busy year ahead of us! We’ll be taking part in NaNoWriMo again, helping our students to crash the 50,000 barrier and take off into the world; we’re working with the folk at Hoo’s Book Fest to bring about even more booky goodness; and we’re launching our mobile library, which will be making its way around the school at break and lunchtimes, staffed by our enthusiastic KS4 student librarians. Students will have a selection of the most popular books to choose from and can use the service to reserve, return and renew books from anywhere around the site.

Project Rainbow, our LGBT group, is growing in numbers and enthusiasm and is being headed this year by Tegan in Year 12 who has some excellent ideas for events and fundraising plans. I’ll be going on the Stonewall course for school champions later this year and will be spreading the word with staff and students.

Nerdfighters will be continuing on Wednesday lunchtimes, with this year’s theme of Myths and Legends for projects. Those completing projects will be invited to an Alton Towers trip at Easter. Because rollercoasters.  The 24hr Readathon will be taking place again at the end of the spring term. Last year, sponsorship raised enough money to buy two iPads and a Singer sewing machine for the library. The use of our non-fiction collection is dwindling, as expected, so it’s great to be moving more towards online resources. The sewing machine (we’ve named her Adele,) has proved very useful already and has been embraced by the Craft Clubbers and those who have adopted the library as a Maker Space. I’m looking forward to hearing from students later in the year about what else they’d like us to offer.

We’ll also be putting in a bid for some funding to establish an elibrary, using the ebook service from Brown’s, which is designed for school libraries and won’t trip us up with licensing laws in the same way that Amazon did with the Kindles. Fingers crossed, we’ll be able to set up before the end of the year, but it might take a funding bid for the next financial year to get it fully up and running.

And I’ll be continuing my use of the Bullet Journal system that I trialled for the second half of last year. So far it’s proved an immensely useful and flexible way of dealing with the varied and oddly paced workload that accompanies a school library.

The new Year 7s are settling in well, with inductions on-going and surveys being completed. Once again I spoke at the new Yr7 Parents' Evening about the importance of reading and the benefits it can offer. Getting my own research up to date was again so useful, and I found some of the evidence that was used to show that regular readers have a 10% advantage in maths. It's all down to neural pathways, and now I'd like to do a stack more neurological research! I may need the medical dictionary... The Year 8s are currently filling in their reader surveys so that I can track progress from last year

Oh, and it’s Open Evening next week! The library will host book themed cos-players for the evening and our display with be based around Shelfies, photos of staff and students’ bookcases. There’ll be a guess the bookshelf competition for students to complete.

Phew. Busy start!