Library News From Week Beginning 6th to 17th January 2020 (34)

Author Alan Nolan visit

Author and Illustrator Alan Nolan was working with our 2nd years and TY students on Thursday - thanks to Citibank for sponsoring our Reading Champion and to Children’s Books Ireland for organising it all.

Alan showed the 2nd years how to draw the giant budgie from one of his books. He will also talked about books in general, bringing in some favourites from his childhood as examples of how they influenced his own books. For the first of the classes with the TYs, Alan started preparation work with them on a comic strip project based where thee students with illustrate their favourite song.

Reading Challenge Week 1

The JCSP Team are running a Reading Challenge from mid-January. This will finish in March and winners will be announced on World Book Day, March 5th. All 1st and 2nd years are being challenged to achieve an individual points target based on their reading level. Students “earn” points by taking the Accelerated Reader quiz for the book they have just read. Accelerated Reader (AR) points are based on word count and difficulty and AR uses them to keep track of how much reading a student has done and quizzed on. We will have a weekly display of reading progress on the library notice boards and in the staff room post regular updates on Facebook, Twitter & Instragram as well as the school website.

Most classes were off to a good start this week with the Reading Challenge. The class in the lead at the moment is Class 102, Ms Fallon’s English class on 65 points and in 2nd place is Ms Kavanagh’s 2nd year group with 53 points. Great work - keep it up.

Debbie Thomas CDETB Writer in Residence

The CDETB Writer in Residence worked with a group of our 2nd years on Friday 17th January. Debbie guided students through a series of questions and using their imaginations students wrote about an adventure getting lost. The group produced great work again today. Debbie will be back for another on February 7th.

LGBT Meeting

We had a large attendance at this group again, we watched an animated movie and chatted about it and they made lists in groups of other movies/ songs to share for next meeting on January 22nd.

Library Assistants

A great group of 1st years and 2nd years have volunteered to be Library Assistants this year. During the first week of term, the first year Library Assistants did two hour training lesson with Jenny. This covered shelving fiction & nonfiction, checking in & out books, checking for quiz on AR Bookfind, AR stickering, spine labelling. Students did role plays of various situations and were put into pairs to practice what they had learned.

Author Rod Smith

Rod Smith met with our Creative Writing group on Friday. They discussed their recent trip to Poolbeg Press, ideas on how they could contribute to Rod's next book on World War 2 along with a new YA magazine looking for writers at the moment as well as their next trip to MOLI.

SORA

All Larkin staff and students now have access to the Sora App, a digital library, from which

you can borrow eBooks and audio books and read/listen to them on your phones, tablets or laptops. To access our JCSP digital library collection, just download the Sora App and choose Larkin.

Logins: Each student has been assigned a login for Sora. You can get this in the plastic folder inside the library door, from Jenny or Michelle or email us larkinlibrary@gmail.com

All 1st years have now been given their Sora login details.