It's great so many book related competitions out there at the moment. I have come across three really good ones in the last couple of days and for someone who enjoys writing there is one really good one from Frances Lincoln that looks brilliant.
As part of their diverse voices children's book award they want to celebrate cultural diversity by having an unpublished author submit a piece of work that they feel emcourages and promotes diversity within children's fiction. With a minimum of 15,000 and a maximum of 35,000 words anyone over 16 can enter.
Another competition which you may want to enter has one of the federation's exectutive members on its judging panel. Martin Kromer has been asked to sit on the panel for the Seven Stones competition. The competiton gives children a chance to become a character in a book. All they have to do is read the book The Seven Stones and write in no more than 100 words what your fave charater was and why!
The third competition is from Penguin and gives readers of Charlie Higsons new zombie book The Enemy a chance to win a really frightening experience at Thorpe Park on halloween. All you need to do is visit and www.the-enemy.co.uk/halloween good luck!!
About Me
- Adam Lancaster
- I currently work as a school librarian at a school in Welwyn Garden City in Herts. I am also the Chair of the Federation of Children's Book Groups a National Reading and Literacy Charity as well as being founder of National Non-Fiction Day. I also work as an indepedent consultant to publishers, schools and librarans
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Books
I have been quite lucky so far this half term and have managed to read a few books already. In our library we shadow so many book awards through the year (in total we run 14 book groups through the year) that keeping up with all those books as well as making sure i am reading books for the Red House Book Award its always hard to be on top of things. I am hoping to finish off this half term the Teenage Book Award but also to read some of the books that have been piled up next to my bed!!
Our School
A little bit of a personal one now as for the first half term of school we have been extremely busy in our school library. Of course we have been continuing to test as many books as possible with some becoming extremely popular. At the moment we are all loving the Hunger Games, an excellent read that has had all talking at break and lunchtimes about it. We have also been shadowing the Teenage Book Award, which has been a great list and has given us loads of things to talk about, whether good or bad!!
We have also been celebrating Black History Month and National Poetry Day throughout October and have run a number of really fun interactive events including invited rapper and poet BREIS to our library to work with students on creating their own raps. We booked BREIS through the excellent website Apples and Snakes and would highly recommend them and BREIS.
In Herts we also have a big history with the abolition of the Slave Trade and visited our county archives to learn more. Having a background myself in creative writing it was great to have the students partake in some imaginative writing using the excellent archives as inspirations for their stories.
Another project that includes writing has been the Write Path International Story writing project which we also took part in. It was great fun to write stories that had been started by top authors and then contributed to by schools all over the world. The students that took part loved it so much they have started their own version of it between them and as a school we are also writing another story that has been contricuted to by staff and students. It was a project we started last year and proved so successful we decided to do another one!!
One new thing for our library has been to turn it into a eco friendly and sustainable one. We have set up a group called the committee whose job it is to work within the library to make sure we are meeting certain requirements. We are also going to be working within the local community sharing stories with primary schools, raising money for the local children's hospital and Great Ormond Street, planting tress in a new local forest and also working to raise books for a school in South Africa that we have recently been twinned with. We hope that we can make our library work as hard as possible to become a major part of our local community and to help other libraries around the world and area enjoy reading as much as we do!!
We have also been celebrating Black History Month and National Poetry Day throughout October and have run a number of really fun interactive events including invited rapper and poet BREIS to our library to work with students on creating their own raps. We booked BREIS through the excellent website Apples and Snakes and would highly recommend them and BREIS.
In Herts we also have a big history with the abolition of the Slave Trade and visited our county archives to learn more. Having a background myself in creative writing it was great to have the students partake in some imaginative writing using the excellent archives as inspirations for their stories.
Another project that includes writing has been the Write Path International Story writing project which we also took part in. It was great fun to write stories that had been started by top authors and then contributed to by schools all over the world. The students that took part loved it so much they have started their own version of it between them and as a school we are also writing another story that has been contricuted to by staff and students. It was a project we started last year and proved so successful we decided to do another one!!
One new thing for our library has been to turn it into a eco friendly and sustainable one. We have set up a group called the committee whose job it is to work within the library to make sure we are meeting certain requirements. We are also going to be working within the local community sharing stories with primary schools, raising money for the local children's hospital and Great Ormond Street, planting tress in a new local forest and also working to raise books for a school in South Africa that we have recently been twinned with. We hope that we can make our library work as hard as possible to become a major part of our local community and to help other libraries around the world and area enjoy reading as much as we do!!
Campaigns
Since my last post its been great to see the support that the reading campaigns are getting. Alan Gibbons is doing sterling work and finally it seems that Cilip the Professional body for librarians has got on board. My feelings about Cilip are not unknown in the fact that all the work Alan is doing is amazing but for those librarians who pay their fees to Cilip you wonder what their job is if its not to defend the rights of libraries and librarians.
It is though encouraging to see so many people supporting Alan and there was a also a really positive article in the Yorkshire Post last week highlighting the campaign and the ways in which it is helping to bring this issue into open.
It is though encouraging to see so many people supporting Alan and there was a also a really positive article in the Yorkshire Post last week highlighting the campaign and the ways in which it is helping to bring this issue into open.
Wow
Well after thinking that it would be nice to take a couple of weeks of on holiday it seems that that has turned into, well, a couple of months. I cannot believe how much time has gone since i last posted on here. But I can promise you that it has defiantely not been through a lack of activity! Since the last post I have spent a lot of time having meetings in dark rooms about very exciting porjects that are going to be taking place over the next year! At the moment it's all a little hush hush but I can say I am very excited indeed!!
Thursday, 9 July 2009
London Meeting
I had a really positive meeting yesterday up in London about a project that I have been working on for a while. I'm hoping that is going to become a big thing and another way in which the federation can get more people reading and enjoying books and in particular all types of books!
There will definately be more to come on this but at the moment I am keeping things under my hat!!
There will definately be more to come on this but at the moment I am keeping things under my hat!!
St Albans Literary Dinner
We held on Thursday the 2nd July our second Literary Dinner at the beautiful setting of the St Albans Abbey. As with most groups we run a lot of events for children throughout the year and decided last year that it would be really good to hold something for adults. I reprised the role of compere again this year and think I did a pretty ok job! We were really lucky to have a great line up of authors who all spoke about their books and writing and read from their books.
To open the evening Philip Ardagh gave us some anecdotes about his writing and his love for Aussie tv show Neighbours. Next Leander Deeny, actor and author, read from his book Hazel's Phantasmagoria' and acted out the scene from the film Atonement which he appeared in alongside Keira Knightley. To round the evening off we had Kevin Crosseley Holland - a writing hero of mine! - who told us about his writing and his love of myths and legends and old england!
On the whole it was a brilliant evening and one which we hope will be happening every year!!
To open the evening Philip Ardagh gave us some anecdotes about his writing and his love for Aussie tv show Neighbours. Next Leander Deeny, actor and author, read from his book Hazel's Phantasmagoria' and acted out the scene from the film Atonement which he appeared in alongside Keira Knightley. To round the evening off we had Kevin Crosseley Holland - a writing hero of mine! - who told us about his writing and his love of myths and legends and old england!
On the whole it was a brilliant evening and one which we hope will be happening every year!!
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