As you think about your submission for the First Minister’s Reading Challenge, you’ll be thinking about the ways to build a reading culture with the children you work with. This article will take you through Scottish Book Trusts’ other school progammes and how you can use them to promote reading with the children you work with.
Author events
Authors Live is a series of recorded events with world-class authors and illustrators. Visit the Authors Live section of our website to find our upcoming dates. You can tune in live and join in with activities including writing and drawing. You can also join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #BBCAuthorsLive.
Our on Authors Live on Demand catalogue also lets you catch up with over 90 recorded events at any time at no cost. The on demand catalogue is searchable, meaning you can filter by ages or topics, or let pupils look for a favourite author or illustrator.
Scottish Book Trust also run live programmes including the Scottish Friendly Children’s Book Tour which brings authors, illustrators and creative practitioners directly into your school. Our Arts Alive programme also part-funds workshops and visits that connect reading and books with art-forms including dance, music, theatre and visual art.
If you’d like to shape your own author engagement, you can access our Live Literature funding and database. You can use these to bring an author into your school for a range of delivery including, but not limited to, visits, workshops, staff training or residencies.
Learning resources and apps
Bookzilla is Scottish Book Trust’s app developed for primary and secondary school children where individual children, or a whole class, can track what they’re reading, find recommendations for what to read and access reading challenges.
If children your class have their own devices, they can download it and use it individually, including at home. Or, you can use shared devices, or cast to a smartboard, to explore it as a class. On the Scottish Book Trust website, you can find lesson plans for introducing and using Bookzilla with your class.
On the resources section of this website you’ll also find a suite of resources you can use to deliver reading projects or activities with the children you work with.
Book gifting
The Bookbug Primary 1 Bag is given to all children in P1 and contains three books and learning resources. All three books are also eligible for the Bookbug Picture Book Prize, where families can vote for their favourite of the three online. Read, Write, Count are Scottish Book Trust’s book gifting programmes for children in P2 and P3 – with each bag containing books and resources that encourage literacy and numeracy skills.
If your class is a P1, P2 or P3 class, you can think about how you gift these books to families as well as revisiting the books in class with the classroom activities on our website. There’s lots of ways to use these books, as well as a lot of opportunities to promote reading across the curriculum and with families.
Across our all of these programmes, whichever you may choose to engage with, what is important to include in your submission is what you delivered and the impact it had on your pupils. Whether it’s a pupil deciding to read a book after finding it on Bookzilla, or your class has an inspirational visit from an author, what we want to see in a submission is how you offered the children you work with a range of opportunities to engage with books, and how this changed or developed their enjoyment of reading.
Registration is now open for this year's Reading Challenge. Take part and see where your reading journey takes you!