Awfully Big Blog Adventure Lit Fest

The one festival I’ll be able to get to this year. Sheer brilliance.

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Ready for next summer

Looking at the Freerice blog, one post jumped out at me, which said their local libraries held challenges for older children over the summer holidays and raising so many grains of rice on Freerice was one of them. I love this idea. I read voraciously, but it’s not the only thing I choose to spend [...]

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The best review ever

Terry Pratchett – Only you can save mankind Lots of people think that you either like reading or you don’t, and that’s not true. There’s books that you’ll like and books that you won’t. You just have to find the right book. I tell kids that all the time. But this reply is one of [...]

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Library book contract – some thoughts

We’ve heard on the grapevine that the book suppliers are being asked to tender for a library book and textbook contract. The Sunday Post has now run an article, but nothing’s been seen in the TESS yet.  I’m concerned that with a single supplier, school librarians will lose the chance to actually see the books we want to [...]

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Ostrich Boys

Three boys kidnap the ashes of their best friend, Ross, after his funeral to give him the send off they think he would have liked, but crash into disaster after disaster. It’s wonderful stuff. I loved how the story slowly unfolded to add detail onto detail of Ross’ life, but through the eyes of his [...]

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The Moon Stallion

Finished it overnight, and it was as magical as I remembered the television programme to be.  I remember being quite frightened watching it at the time (I’d have been about 9 years old, I think). I was interested to see what specifics stuck in my mind: the toad skeleton, the horse magic, the Celtic goddess [...]

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Water Week

A blether with a colleague turned into a fully fledged plan for an Eco Schools cross-curricular Week of Water. It would obviously need to be ok’d by SMT, but nothing here is too difficult or costly and most of it ties in beautifully with what’s already in the curriculum. Just brainstorming, we came up with [...]

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Scaring children

There’s been a wee cluster of stories on the news about whether it’s a good idea to scare children in stories. Driving to work on Friday morning, I heard John Humphries interviewing author, John Connolly, about his new book, “The Gates” (subtitled, “the gates of hell are about to open”), and discussing whether authors are [...]

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Burke and Hare by Conaghan and Pickering

Took a group of Upper School pupils along to Motherwell Library this morning to see Martin Conaghan and Will Pickering discuss their graphic novel about Burke and Hare. I had always assumed that the author just wrote the story and the artist interpreted it in his or her own way. I had no idea about [...]

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SLF09: CANVAS

I’m in love. I’m so much in love. The virtual world created for CANVAS is just stunning. The kids will love it too. We’ll never be able to get them out. Enough rambling. CANVAS (Children’s Art at the National Virtual Arena for Scotland) is a virtual art gallery created to house artworks from our schools. [...]

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