“Worldwide words, reading for fun across our continent”

 Proposed Reading-related Activities

We all work to promote reading with our students so each partner school should post events we are planning to run anyway up on our blogs, and the Project site. It is work we will carry out anyway but by giving it a wider audience we will get extra value from each activity, and highlight the fact that being interested in books and reading is something to celebrate, a positive interest for many teenagers in many schools across Europe.

I propose we plan some co-ordinated activities in common, giving us themes to work around; for example:

October – Caught-reading photographs made into posters – put up around school site and on project site and each school blog.

November – favourite book promotion – peer-to-peer recommendations are very powerful so each school team should make their own posters/bookmarks/recommended reading displays/presentations/films etc. to promote favourite reads. The results of the promotions will be shown at each school and on blogs, and project TwinSpace. Comments from partner schools will be added to each local display to show what a wider world audience think of the promotional material.

December – Favourite winter reading – the theme will be books about winter/cold climate reading or favourite seasonal stories.

The partner schools will also try to co-ordinate times for a web-conference to meet each other’s project teams, celebrate the project’s achievements, plan for the New Year and have a party!

January 2013

Learn something new – factual books are sometimes overlooked in thinking about promoting reading. This month we should highlight non-fiction titles to recommend to each other.

February – Love stories – to coincide with Valentine’s Day.

March – Manga month – best manga reads, and workshop on how to draw manga style – if we can use web collaboration ICT to draw a short manga story in collaboration I think that will be very exciting for participants.

April – World Book Day in Europe – event around European authors

And so on…

There are many reading related activities carried out in schools. I plan to recruit a core group from Library regulars, a mixture of older and younger students to be the main student team, backed up by the official school Book Club. I will also involve English and other subject teachers in producing work for the project, wherever relevant. My aim is to bring the reading culture alive by involving many different groups, ages and subjects in the Library project.

I have listed a few ideas above – as a group I am sure we can come up with more ideas, especially once we let the students suggest activities. Where possible we should aim to use ICT to collaborate, encouraging students to explore their creative responses to books with different software. I hope we can agree to produce an e-magazine to celebrate our project and enhance the feeling that reading for pleasure is worth celebrating.