Good News Stories from School Libraries – March 2024

Welcome to our second edition of the School Libraries Group Blog. If this is your first time reading this blog, the aim of this blog is to highlight and promote activities taking place in school libraries around Ireland. Stories featured include events, special guests, literacy initiatives and more nationwide.

Book Club at Muckross Park College

Early mornings (8 a.m.) lounging on sofas, nibbling on biscuits, drinking juices or warm cups of tea, discussing the merits and downfalls of some popular and not so popular reads.  We have seven book clubs in Muckross Park College and so far this academic year we have read and reviewed the following books:  Where the crawdads sing; Small things like these; The kite runner; Punching the air; Educated; The inheritance games; The perfectionists and Truly devious. 

It’s a wonderful way to start the day exchanging views on books with other book lovers!

Literary Trick-or-Treat in the Mount Sackville Library

In Mount Sackville last October, librarian Mary-Beth trialed a ‘Literary Trick-or-Treat’ idea with first and second year students and it worked really well! 

Literary Trick-or-Treating, step by step:

1. 42 spooky/Halloween-themed books were selected and divided into 6 groups of 7 books. Mary-Beth created 6 questionnaires, each with 7 questions. Questions were designed so that student would be able to find the answers by looking at the front or back covers, or on the first page of the book. 

For example:

This famous vampire love story features Bella Swan and Edward Cullen.  

Title: 

Author: 

Give 3 adjectives used to describe Edward (on the back cover) 

Answers: Twilight by Stephanie Meyer; mesmerizing, supernatural, irresistible, impenetrable

2. With the help of 1^st Year Library Assistants, 42 coloured pumpkins were cut and laminated – there were 6 different colours, one for each group (orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and red).
3. Pumpkins were then attached to the spine of the books and put back on the shelves.
4. Students came into the library with their English class. Each class has around 24 girls, so they were divided into 6 groups of 4 students. They were assigned a colour and were instructed to run around the library to find all of the pumpkins associated with that colour.
5. Once they had found all 7 pumpkins, they were given a question sheet. They had to use the books to answer all the questions.
6. When they finished, they presented their question sheet. Their answers were checked and if they were all correct, they got to choose a ‘trick’ from the ‘Bag of Tricks’ – i.e., sing a song, do a dance, say ‘Hello, my name is xxx’ in a different language, etc.
7. Once the whole group had done the ‘trick,’ they then got a treat (i.e., chocolate or jellies). 

The activity took about 30 minutes to complete; the plan is to expand it next year so that there are 10 books and 10 questions per group.  The students enjoyed it and it was useful (and challenging enough) for both 1^st and 2^nd Years.