Patron of Reading Conference 2016

Last weekend, the third Patron of Reading conference took place at the DoubleTree Hotel in Manchester. It was on a whole different level from the previous two that we'd organised. We even had sponsors (thank you MLS for all your support!) and a working sound system, which was a huge step in the right direction.

The line-up for the day was absolutely fantastic from start to finish. Speakers included authors The Two Steves, John Dougherty, Joffre White and SF Said; Miranda McKearney, OBE. from Empathy Lab; Marilyn Brocklehurst from Norfolk Children's Book Centre; Rob Smith, creator of the Literacy Shed; storyteller Marjorie Leithead and performance poet Tony Walsh. We also had wonderful contributions from librarians Mandy Wilson and Gill Ward; teacher John Bentham; organiser of the Haringey Chapter, Ian Coles from the Big Green Bookshop and Chris Lunt from MLS. The day was ably (??) compered by Patron of Reading founder, headteacher Tim Redgrave.

To find out more about the day, have a read of:

• the Haringey Chapter's Report
• Dom Conlon's report
• Bev Humphrey's storify 

You can find a summary of the day's events by using the Twitter hashtag #PoRConf16. Also, here's the link to the MLS Reading for Pleasure video and the link to a video created by author Marcus Alexander. Marcus was supposed to be presenting on the day, but unfortunately he recently broke both his biceps on a piece of gymnastics equipment!

I'm delighted, and very proud, to be involved in such a great scheme. After talking to several authors, teachers and librarians on the day, it's clear that it's having a real impact on reading in schools across the UK. I believe that Tim is already making plans for #PoRConf17...

 

 Hopefully Brenda enjoyed herself as much as we did!

 

          

 

           

           

          

 

 

 

An exciting week at school!

This week, the staff of my school were lucky enough to have two extremely influential sets of visitors come and work with us.

On Wednesday we were joined Miranda McKearney OBE, who created The Reading Agency, and Craig Hill. They are both focusing their energies on a brand new project, Empathy Lab. We're pleased to be one of only 12 schools in the country involved in trialling the project. The focus is on using books and stories to improve children's empathy skills. We talked about a lot of exciting ideas, including creating Empathy Detectives and Book Spotters, as well as using Empathy Mentors The focus will be on the children in Year 5 to start with, but the plan is to spread the initiative across the school. We'll be meeting Miranda and her team again in a couple of months so we can give feedback alongside the other schools involved.

On Friday we were delighted to host a training day delivered by Rob Smith, the genius behind The Literacy Shed website. He spend the whole day sharing inspirational ways to use film and images in the classroom to help improve children's writing. There were about 20 teachers there from about five schools, and it was wonderful to see such a buzz of excitement and enthusiasm in the room. Rob is a really entertaining speaker, with a wealth of knowledge about teaching English, and the general consensus was that it was one of the most useful training sessions in a very long time!