20/04/2009

Easter Reading

Just back to work after the Easter holidays, which were a great opportunity to catch up with some reading. I am working through a great big stack of unread novels. I am trying to alternate between 'adult' books and 'kids' books, so as well as We Need To Talk About Kevin
and The Tenderness of Wolves, I read Hoot, Piggies and, best of all, Mortal Engines.

I read Philip Reeves Here Lies Arthur a while back, and I think it is one of the best books I have read for sometime, so I was keen to check out his back catalogue and Mortal Engines did not disappoint. With the sad death of JG Ballard one of my idols, we need all the dystopias we can get, so the post-nuclear war world of the Mortal Engines Quartet is a recommended place to spend some time.

You might also be interested in Gone. I read a review in the Guardian, about how it is written as if it were a video game, ie. perfect those reluctant boys. I also recall the trailer for the book, done as if it were a film. Well for the multimedia hat-trick you can read the whole book online for free, you need to be quick - it is only available until 22 April 2009.

02/04/2009

Volunteers Meeting 1 April 2009 (no joke)

We had our termly Volunteer Reading Mentor Meeting yesterday (April Fools Day!) at the Quadrant, in a different format to last time we had a single meeting for Sheffield and Rotherham volunteers, which I think worked well.

We watched the Reading Matters video, which many volunteers had not seen, despite it being quite old now, I gave a quick overview of the Inspire Rotherham project and the materials that are resulting, for example some Rotherham United themed Fun Sheets but the star of the show was Rebecca Fisher a long term volunteer at St Bernard's School. Rebecca gave a short but very informative presentation on how she had carefully adapted her reading sessions to meet the very particular needs of her pupil partners. You kind of had to be there, but you can get the gist of hew work from her presentation:
Reading Matters R Fisher Presentation 1 April 20009
One of the key things to arise from Rebecca's presentation and from other Volunteer Reading Mentors is the quality and appropriateness of the Activity Sheets Reading Matters uses. This is food for thought for me, we need to do some work on the hard copies of the sheets we have, in the meantime I would refer you to some of the sheets I have mentioned before on this blog here and here.