Booktrust

The wonderful Booktrust has just donated this box of gorgeous new books to us. Booktrust has been promoting books, reading and writing for more than 90 years. They are the gold standard in this business.  Thank you, Booktrust, your gift will be hugely appreciated. Now please go back to Give a Book.

London Book Swap Day and International Book Giving Day

So, for those in London,  Saturday 15th February is London Book Swap Day taking place in 19 venues across London. And yesterday, St Valentine's Day, was  International Book Giving Day. We were delighted to be part of it.  Our own Adeela gave these to a local group of toddlers as part of IBGD. She says: "The kids and their parents were really surprised and pleased to receive new books and did spread the word of IBGD!"

National Libraries Day

Today, Saturday February 8th 2014, is National Libraries Day. The Children's Laureate, Malorie Blackman, often cited and celebrated in the GAB blog, has written rousingly today in The Guardian about her own use of libraries when a child as a home from home, on the importance of libraries for everyone as story-telling hubs, resource, book repository and so much more. She writes: "As far as I am concerned every day should be National Libraries Day." Here at GAB we second that. Our Magic Breakfast Book Clubs hook up with the local library so that the love of books and reading born in the book clubs spills over into the world outside. Every member of our Book Clubs gets their own special library card.  Give a Book.

International Book Giving Day

Friday 14th February is not only St Valentine's Day, celebrated by birds, poets and lovers since Chaucer's time and maybe even before that; it's also International Book Giving Day, the day dedicated to getting new, used and borrowed books in the hands of as many children as possible. GAB's own Adeela has written a blog for them about our work and everything you can do to help. So please do go back to Give a Book and do just that.

Shared reading groups at The Reader Org

Our friends The Reader Org have sent us word and pictures of the Kensal Book Break group reading The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham, sharing their personal responses to the book as they read it together, over a cup of tea and biscuits.
“This book has got everything; gossip, history, romance. A gripping story so far, can’t wait to find out what happens next.”

In all of their shared reading groups they read aloud together from the same text, often taking several months to read a whole book as they share the experience of the story unfolding week by week. They tell us: "It's brilliant for us to have these sets of several copies of the same book which we can keep for as long as it takes us to read the whole book, and will be read by other groups in future."

You can find all their weekly shared reading groups here: http://www.thereader.org.uk/reading-with-us.aspx.

Now please go back to Give a Book and help us carry on doing this.

Books for children at Christmas

Here's a cheering and inspiring story for Christmas--Juliet is a one-woman Give a Book who collects new books and gives them to 16 or more venues---including hospitals and children's hospices. She also set up a thriving phone box library in her home village. She told us "St Thomas's are collecting from me later this week for their general wards, and the Evelina children’s department, and then Great Ormond Street next week....so that all children incarcerated over the Christmas period get a gift from Father Christmas`s literary pile!?"
So why not Give a Book for Christmas to someone who really needs one.

Thank you

The excellent and generous Portobello Press  have kindly donated lovely new fliers to Give a Book for Christmas. Huge thanks from all of us for this support.

Michael Morpurgo

Wonderful news that Michael Morpurgo has just been announced as the new president of Booktrust.
Christmas cheer indeed. 

Tales with Teddy

The wonderful Reader Org has just started a children's reading project at White City Community Centre. Give a Book was delighted to give the books for this and we've just had this lovely thank you.

Living the story

Michael Morpurgo has again written affectingly about the importance of reading time for children. In an wonderful article in The Times on Saturday 7th December he reminisces about his own childhood and being read to by his mother and grandmother and through them acquiring the love of stories. In his ideal world every child would have that special reading time both  at school and at home. And every child would have books of their own to love, cherish and return to for life. He lists 8 books that he'd love every child to have:
The Tiger who came to Tea by Judith Kerr; Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel by Victoria Lee Burton; The Elephant's Child by Rudyard Kipling (which was his choice for our GAB Book of the Month back in August 2011); Charlotte's Web by E.B.White; The Iron Man by Ted Hughes; The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson; The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde; The Man who planted Trees by Jean Giono.
1 in 3 homes in the UK have no books at all. The single strongest indicator of future success in a child is whether or not there are books in the home. So why not Give a Book to someone who really needs one this Christmas?

Thank you

We've just heard that Discount Banner Printing is going to support Give a Book with free printing of  leaflets. They generously do this for several charities. So a huge thank you to them for this gift to us. We greatly appreciate it.

Poetry inside

Great Poetry Slam at Pentonville the other day--powerful poetry and song from the heart. Dorigen Hammond of Writers in Prison had elicited great work. The judges-- who performed too-- were the brilliant Chris Preddie and Joelle Taylor.  The winner the extraordinary Chanel. Coincides with the publication of Inside Poetry: Voices from Prison Volume 5 and as Rachel Billington, the editor, writes "Their voices fly with their message over barbed wire and high walls to freedom."
Give a Book is pleased to have given dictionaries for prizes and to be there.

Bring back story time

The former children's laureate, Michael Morpurgo, has called on the Government to reinstate story time in all schools, saying children need time in the day for reading and quiet contemplation. His words were reported in The Telegraph today and were spoken at the opening of the wonderful Brackenbury Primary School Library. At this school in West London a bunch of mums got together to raise money and build a superb new library where there had been none. Give a Book is delighted to have been able to help put books on their shelves in this excellent project and congratulate them on their achievement.

Thanks from Avondale School

We love to hear how it's going so thank you Avondale Primary School for this lovely card. And thanks to all who support Give a Book to make it possible.

George Heriot's School

 George Heriot's School in Edinburgh has a fine literary magazine called Ink. It's entirely edited and written by the pupils. They made a particularly lovely first issue and donated the proceeds to Give a Book. This came out of the blue, out of cyberspace, and we were and are delighted by this generosity. Thank you, all, at George Heriot's for thinking of us. It means a lot to us. And your magazine looks great.

Martina Cole urges prisons to join Six Book Challenge adult literacy drive

International bestselling author Martina Cole has called on all prisons and young offender institutions (YOIs) across the UK to sign up for The Reading Agency’s annual, nationwide Six Book Challenge to increase literacy skills among prisoners and help reduce reoffending rates. She was speaking at a special event – held yesterday at the Free Word Centre, The Reading Agency’s central London home – for prisons already running the scheme. (The Reading Agency is an independent charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life, by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers.)
Launched in 2008 by The Reading Agency, the Six Book Challenge is increasingly recognised as a key intervention using reading for pleasure to help tackle this country’s continuing skills deficit. As recently highlighted by an OECD study England’s 16- to 24-year-olds rank 22nd out of the 24 countries taking part for literacy skills (see ‘Notes to editors’).However, ninety per cent of survey respondents say that they are more confident about reading after taking part in the Six Book Challenge, which invites them to pick six reads of their choice and complete a reading diary in order to get a certificate.
Martina Cole, rated by prison library staff as the most widely read author in prisons, is the ambassador for the 2014 Six Book Challenge. She said: “I meet a lot of prisoners who really struggle with literacy but they’re prepared to give my books a go. What I like about the Six Book Challenge is that it’s encouraging people to read who wouldn’t otherwise do so.I’m really happy to be supporting it." She added: "Next year I will do a Six Book Challenge tour and visit lots of participating prisons.”
Over 100 prisons now run the Six Book Challenge with around 7000 prisoners taking part this year. However this is still under 10% of the UK’s prison population of 93,000, half of which have poor literacy skills. The Reading Agency aims to reach at least 10% of offenders and extend use of the Six Book Challenge to all 150 prisons, YOIs and secure units in the UK by 2015.
"Low literacy blights the chance for far too many prisoners to turn their lives around. But we’ve seen the Six Book Challenge make a difference to their attitude to reading and learning and help them make a new start in preparation for release,” said Genevieve Clarke, adult literacy specialist at The Reading Agency. “We’re determined to extend it to all prisons and deepen its impact where it is already used. Martina Cole’s support in promoting the scheme to prisoners and prison staff will definitely help us to achieve this.”
As ambassador for the 2014 Six Book Challenge Martina Cole will be visiting prisons to talk about the scheme. She has already spoken at an event at HMP Lewes in Sussex on 3 October to mark its success in the Prison Libraries’ Group Prison Library of the Year competition, and on 15 October she visited HMP Swaleside in Kent as their ‘prize’ for winning the 2013 Six Book Challenge draw for participating prisons.
Twenty prisons received special awards from The Reading Agency this year for the number of prisoners they supported for the 2013 Six Book Challenge, including HMP Pentonville in London which has achieved 236 completers.
“Seven out of ten of our prisoners say they have a learning or literacy problem,” said Nick Walmsley, regimes manager at HMP Pentonville. “We are convinced that doing the Six Book Challenge encourages them to come into our library and use the facilities and get back into education. And we all believe that not only does it assist prisoners whilst they are in prison, but that when they leave, it has a positive effect on an ex-prisoner’s ability to remain an ex-prisoner, and not re-offend.”
"I love the Six Book Challenge,” said keynote speaker Gabrielle Lee, governor, HMYOI Deerbolt in County Durham, which won a silver award for 115 young offenders completing the Six Book Challenge. “It takes real courage to attempt something like this when you've not had success at school. Getting prisoners to start the Challenge can also be the time when they realise they may need some help in other areas of their life. If we get their trust through the Challenge it can lead on to looking at ways they can make other changes."
The Reading Agency’s Six Book Challenge in prisons is supported with funding from the City of London Corporation’s charity City Bridge Trust, the Bromley Trust and Give a Book which has donated dictionaries to Six Book Challenge completers.

Reading for Pleasure

Neil Gaiman gave the second annual lecture for The Reading Agency the other day. Miranda McKearney OBE, Founding Director of The Reading Agency said: "Tonight is part of an urgent debate about how to build a nation of readers and library users. Who better than the extraordinary Neil Gaiman to help us think through new solutions to the fact that for a wealthy country, with free education, we have a shocking literacy problem?"

Gaiman said: "I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things."
He then spoke about 'the power of fiction to transform our understanding of the world and turn us into citizens': "The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy giving them access to those books and letting them read them."
He cited research by America's private prison industry, showing why reading fiction is so important: "I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons - a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth - how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based about asking what percentage of ten and eleven year olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure. It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations. And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction."
Now please go back to Give a Book.

The culture of reading

Recently Viv Bird, dynamic CEO of the wonderful Booktrust spoke out about the need to change the culture of reading. She announced the new Booktrust Best Book Awards and spoke of the goal to 'see children pestering their parents for Malorie Blackman’s latest book alongside their pleas for One Direction tickets.'  Like the Children's Laureate we all want 'to get more children reading more.'
Then there has been the great news that Waterstones raised £75,000 for the Children's Reading Fund.
And a report came out that reading levels amongst 7 year olds have risen significantly. However, a survey showed that fewer than 1 in 3 older children read books outside school and many think it 'uncool' to be seen with a book.
Research from the New School for Social Research in New York showed that people who read literary fiction perform better in social interactions. David Kidd, a psychologist, is quoted as saying that "literary fiction really involves the reader in a certain type of social interaction. What a great author of literary fiction does is scaffold our theory of mind---pulling us into a situation where we have to use our capacity to understand people to its fullest extent."
In other words, have a little Chekhov to get through your day.  And then please do go back to Give a Book.

Night Walks

The extraordinary Maggie's Culture Crawl took place last night. Hundreds of walkers assembled in the early autumn evening sunshine in Victoria Embankment Gardens. The walk kicked off with music, a rousing warm up, and the fabulous Dame Harriet Walter and husband Guy Paul reading selections from Dickens' Night Walks to see them off into the night.  Later, actors Jamie Glover, Harry Livingstone, Sarah Whitehouse, and GAB's own the wonderful Helen Mumby read poems from Josephine Hart's anthology Catching Life by the Throat in the exotic surroundings of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. Walkers came, stopped to listen, were gripped and then walked on to taste Fortnum & Mason's tea before walking away into the night.
At the end of the 15 mile walk every walker was given a copy of Night Walks as a memento by Give a Book, who gratefully acknowledge the generous help of Penguin in doing this. It was all in aid of the excellent Maggie's Centres whose new centre opens in Aberdeen on Monday. And GAB was pleased to be part of it. Onwards. And please go on to Give a Book so that we can keep this going.

First Story Festival

First Story held their annual Festival today: around 700 kids from all over the country turned up in Oxford to spend the day talking to writers and writing. Their enthusiasm was infectious. At the end a handful of them, beautifully orchestrated by poet Kate Fox, stood up before the crowd and read from the work they'd done during the day: the talent was prodigious. They were warmly supported by amongst others, the Childrens' Laureate Malorie Blackman, Deborah Moggach, Oxford City poet Kate Clanchy, Mark Haddon, Stephen May and Salena Godden to name but some of the wonderful writers who join in to help First Story.
One of their alumni, award-winning poet Azfa Awad, wrote this for Give a Book:
"I really enjoyed the 'Staying Alive Trilogy' and was inspired by many of the poems. The fact that someone was generous enough to donate the anthologies is incredible and the fun and inspiration we had from the anthology was priceless."
So now please go back to Give a Book to help us keep this going.