Book Week at Newfield

Today (6/10/08) I had the pleasure of spending the afternoon with a group of pupils, a local author, a councillor, school staff and governors at Newfield school.

As part of the school’s book week, Louise Taylor, the Learning Resource Centre Manager, had arranged for the author Malcolm Rose (www.malcolmrose.co.uk) to talk about his work and inspire the pupils to create some stories of their own. She was kind enough to ask me along and I was really glad she did. It was my first visit to a school as the Reading Matters Project Manager, and what a great start. Everyone especially the pupils and Malcolm were so enthusiastic, it was great to be a part of, although the ‘dark’ theme certainly produced some unsettling results.

Newfield is the middle of a massive construction project and the new school building is looking impressive. Louise is already working wonders in the current library, including working with the Reading Matters volunteers, so who knows what she’ll achieve in the new state-of-the-art resource centre?

To my shame, I haven’t read any of Malcolm’s books, but I am certainly going to. It is just a question of where to start – more than books in about 20 years, that’s some going. Kiss of Death has just been added to the booked up scheme (worth a look if you work in a school and fancy some free books - www.bookedup.org.uk) so I reckon that’s worth a look, the Lawless and Tilley books are set in Sheffield so that would be good, but the pupils seemed to be going for books from the Traces series – I’ll see what they’ve got in my local library. You can see Malcolm in person at the Off The Shelf, I’d recommend it).