Encouraging youngsters to fall in love with reading

Photo: Rachel Campling

I have a guest post today from writer and advocate for the joy of reading Rachel Campling. She says:

I am a specialist primary school teacher who works with pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds at Harpole Primary School in Northamptonshire. Unfortunately, some of these pupils did not have a single book at home, other than their school reading book. With the closure of so many libraries, having easy access to free books wasn’t a viable option for them. As an avid reader and writer of children’s fiction, this really upset me. How were they to enjoy escaping into other worlds without access to great books? So, my colleague and I hatched an exciting plan.

We appealed to all the parents of pupils at the school for books that they’d finished with to be donated to us, and happily they came flooding in. This enabled us to set up the Book Swap Shop.

At the beginning of the year every child in the school is given a book. This can be swapped for a different book once they have read it or kept forever if they love it so much. The shop is open every Wednesday lunchtime and the children flock to the bookstand and rifle through the boxes to find their next treasure. They can choose any book they fancy. There is always a buzz of excited chatter as the children recommend books to each other or search for another book by the same author to devour.

The shop itself is run by the pupils I work with, the Book Swap Shop Reading Champions. They organise the books, tick off pupils’ names as they swap books, stamp new stock with a star to show that it’s from our shop, and help other pupils to choose books. This has really helped to raise their self-esteem.

This venture has not only helped our pupils to get their hands on a whole variety of wonderful adventures and factual texts, but it has also generated a love of reading for pleasure throughout the whole school. 

I think this is a fantastic idea. How about you? Are you inspired by Rachel to  try something similar - or are you already? Let us know.

Books for schools

Who should pay to fill the shelves?

On one of my many pre-Christmas trips to Waterstones, I was given a leaflet about forthcoming events - signing sessions, readings, that sort of thing. But also on the leaflet was an appeal for books for schools (actually it said book's for schools - aargh!): 'We are currently working with local schools and their lack of budgets to try and fill up their libraries with some lovely donations...', with a request for children's or adults' fiction or non-fiction books to be dropped into the local branch.

Now, like most readers and writers I have lots of stuff I could donate. But should I? Aren't such things supposed to be state funded - and the more people give, surely the more likely the Government is to think that this is one area it doesn't have to worry about? I know this doesn't help schools struggling to fill their shelves, but somewhere deep inside I'm getting an uneasy feeling about this.

Nevertheless, I am off to town with a carrier bag of books.