Thursday 25 August 2011

SCHOOL NOTES


We have too many books in X's bedroom and I wanted to clear out the ones for babies. I asked her school what they wanted for the school fete- would books be any use? The school secretary shuddered: 'oh, no - please no books."


I went onto facebook to check out aluminae page of the primary where X is heading. It was disappointing to see that most hadn't learnt to spell the name of their school by the time they left. 


Our lovely local library has a much better idea.  X is well used to the library and the lovely staff even know her name, though sadly many of the people who work in the library are  being replaced by a machine like the one I also refuse to use in Sainsburys - they bring out my luddite tendencies.  X uses the library as a playground with her minder on regular basis, and also goes to with me, variously for loo breaks, places to shelter from the rain, eat a snack or just hang out on a bored sunday afternoon. Now, however we are actually borrowing books and even reading them. That's because of a great scheme called www.circus-stars.org   which means that when X reads a book she gets to tell a librarian what she thought about it and get a sticker. I have to hold my hand across my mouth when this conversation happens as I tend to lead it and try to initiate the kind of analysis that my Mr Gibson, my tutor while reading English,  would probably be surprised I could achieve. I'm surprised that X is quite able to say what she thought herself and it definitely seems to have fired her up a bit. She was really keen to share a book about bottoms with a playmate today.  However, when we went on the website I lost the will to live. Maybe it is meant for older children but all that creating passwords and having to fill in all the names of the books and authors and everything all dressed up in the random gamification of a circus got on my nerves. But still a brilliant thing to do in the library. 















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