On 25th November we
embarked on our five week Library activity session with the Year 7 pupils of
Catchpole’s house. Straight away, we marked them out as a bright, energetic and
fun bunch of young people. As we worked our way through the various activities,
we were particularly impressed with the way they handled the 'Dewey Treasure
Hunt' which calls for a bit of lateral thinking, group work and presentation
skills.
The potential fly in the ointment was the advent of the Christmas holidays - right in the middle of the five week block. In the past, students have gone off and in a fog of mince pies, turkey and presents, have completely forgotten what we did in the first three weeks (and who can blame them)? This time however, when they returned, we were pleasantly surprised to find that most had not only remembered but several also started work on their final presentations.
Presentation day came around this Monday and we were really impressed with the high standard across the board. Most were really well constructed with bullet points and lots of interesting images. Many students used notes rather than reading directly from the screen - a key presentational skill. We learned a few new things; for example in the 1930s print trade, promoting the publisher on the cover of a book was considered to be more important than promoting the title! It was a close run thing, but Sarah (who was first up - no mean feat) won out with her wonderful presentation on My Favourite Books. She chose the Harry Potter series and gave us lots of interesting facts and statistics as well as telling us why she liked them. Sam came a close second with his ten humorous but really useful tips on How to Choose What to Read Next and Joseph followed close on his heels with his informative and in-depth presentation on The Book Covers of Penguin Publishing.
Thank you Catchpole’s Year 7. It
was a pleasure working with you!
Mrs Osafo, Mrs Godden, Miss
Kleiman and Mrs Bradley