Bookbug - a Julia Donaldson book for every P1 child

Julia Donaldson and Dillon Ryan (5) from Lochside primary School in Angus, celebrate the gifting of Julia’s award-winning book, What the Ladybird Heard, to every P1 child in Scotland, through Scottish Book Trust’s Bookbug programme. It was also announced at the event that Julia has agreed to become patron of the Bookbug book gifting programme. 

Scottish Book Trust has announced that it will gift a free book to every P1 child in Scotland this November as part of its Bookbug programme, an early year’s initiative that aims to give every child in Scotland a lifelong love of books. 60,000 copies of What the Ladybird Heard by Julia Donaldson, winner of the 2010 Scottish Children's Book Awards, have been distributed to classrooms around the country.

Children entering P1 should already have received three free packs of books from Bookbug at 6 weeks, 18 months, and three years, and so should be familiar with the programme, formerly known as Bookstart. Primary One is the final intervention point.

Scottish Book Trust has also announced that multi-award winning author and Children’s Laureate, Julia Donaldson, has agreed to be patron of the Bookbug programme. Donaldson, who was born in London but now lives in Glasgow, is most famous for her best-selling picture book, The Gruffalo, which was made into an Oscar-nominated animated film last year. To date she has written 160 books.

More information: 

BookbugSessions take place at local libraries or community groups. These are free, fun-filled story and rhyme sessions for 0-4-year-olds.

Teacher resources to support the gifting of What the Ladybird Heard, including posters, games and fun ideas based on themes in the book, are available to download from Scottish Book Trust’s website.

A video of Julia reading What the Ladybird Heard is also available.

Murderous Maths with Kjartan Poskitt

Scottish Book Trust is having another of its "Authors Live" online events next Thursday (1st December, 11-1140am). This time it features Kjartan Poskitt, a mathematician like no other, who will entertain pupils with maths tricks, crack them up with jokes about mathematical formulae and engage them with complex algebra. The event is suitable for children aged 8-14 and if you register your class to watch before Thursday you could win a set of Kjartan's Murderous Maths books - but if you don't win them, check the list of his books that we have here in Jordanhill Library. If you miss the live event you can watch or download the video afterwards using the same link as above.

Kjartan is a freelance everything. Since getting his engineering degree he has worked on Saturday morning TV (including BBC's Swap Shop!), presented science and maths programmes, warmed up thousands of studio audiences, toured his one man show, played a lot of pub pianos very loudly and has been Widow Twankey. In recent months he has been touring the country demonstrating mathematical tricks and oddities from his books. These have been translated in up to 20 languages and include the Murderous Maths series, The Gobsmacking Galaxy, Isaac Newton and his Apple, the Warp Maze with cartoonist Stephen Appleby, four books in his notorious Killer Puzzles series, handbooks on practical jokes and secret codes, six support books for the BBC Schools series Megamaths and a GCSE maths guide. He has also written songs and scripts and worked as a games consultant for a wide range of children's TV shows. 

This nationwide event is part of the Meet our Authors programme, run by Scottish Book Trust and sponsored by Scottish Friendly Assurance. There is also a Meet our Authors Facebook page where you will find background information, interviews, video clips and weblinks all about the programme, plus a great competition for each of the events which you can enter (Facebook account needed).

Christmas is coming....

It is, I'm afraid - we are already stamping January as a due date in library books, and classes in school will already be learning about Christmas. There's a small display upstairs of children's books and media items - to find more, just search for Christmas in SUPrimo (probably best to use "Advanced Search" and "keywords anywhere").

Some other resources that I have come across that might help are:

Richard and Judy’s Children's Christmas Book Club 2011 (via Booktrust).

Christmas resources for primary schools - activities linked to Christmas around the world, from webanywhere.

3 links for creating a festive classroom - also from webanywhere.

TES teaching resources.