Meeting with St Mary's Catholic School (16/10/17)

Monday 16^th October:

On Monday 16^th October we met with Isaac Haskell who is the Assistant Head of St Mary’s Catholic school. Isaac is who we had initial contact with and gave us the project title of supporting the library and helping to raise the achievement of boys in reading.

We had a tour of the school which lead us to the Key Stage Two library. Isaac explained to us that the library is a new set up and the individual classes no longer have their own individual book cases. The school changed this as classes were hugging certain books and the books were not being shared equally across the year group. The library’s new aim is to make the library a place that pupils can go to at the beginning of the day, break time, lunch time and the end of the day. Isaac also explained that throughout the week each class gets a half an hour schedule lot to come to the library, swap books and read.

Next we met in Isaac’s office to discuss his and our own potential ideas. It was made clear that we should follow the idea we are most passionate about as the passion and value will project through when working and create a better outcome. Isaac was impressed by our ideas to create a reading corner and enter a competition. He asked is we could work on creating a display to make the library more aesthetically pleasing but also help in gaining the interest of boys to read.

To organise the project we had to determine the date we would be able to volunteer. Using our diaries and the school’s timetable/diary we sorted out the following dates:

Tuesday 7^th November 9-12pm

Tuesday 14^th November 9-12pm

Wednesday 22^nd November 9-12pm

Monday 27^th November 9-12pm

Tuesday 28^th November 9-12pm

We were made aware that in every session there would be two half an hour reading slots when classes would come in and explore the library and have an opportunity to read. During this time we would be available to help support the children find books or participate in guided reading. This was then noted to be incorporate in our session plans.