Belmont Book Fair and World Book Day
On Friday 7th and Monday 10th - Wednesday 12th March, Nursery, Junior and Senior School pupils at Belmont House School in Newton Mearns, held a Book Fair to help buy books for the School, selling selling almost £1000 worth of books. The event is particularly timely, since Thursday 6th March was World Book Day and 2008 is Year of Reading. To mark World Book Day itself pupils were allowed to dress up as a character from their favourite book. Additionally, Junior 5 pupils organised a readathon in aid of CLIC Sargent, a charity caring for children and young people with cancer. The readathon is mostly being done at home, with the children forecasting how many books they will read in a 3 week period and being sponsored for each one they successfully complete.
The Book Fair was open to pupils over lunchtime on each of the aforementioned days, with Junior School parents also invited to attend on Friday 7th and Senior School parents on Wednesday 12th.
Books for the Fair were supplied by children's book publisher, Scholastic, which allows the School a commission on all books sold via a voucher system. Vouchers are then redeemable through a catalogue for the School to purchase new books for the English Department's ‘Reading for Enjoyment' resource, which links into the ‘Literacy Across the Curriculum' programme.
The event was organised by Senior 3 pupils, who were responsible for both the publicity and for the actual sales of the books themselves, as part of an Enterprise initiative which began last year with the previous S3 class. Due to last year's success it was decided to run the event again this year as a ‘Curriculum for Excellence' activity, encouraging the pupils to work with the local community and outside agencies. Senior 3 pupil, Russell Bell, was very enthusuastic about the Fair: "Everyone has been really supportive of the event and we have sold loads of books. Apart from the actual funds raised to buy books for the School, it is a great way to encourage pupils to read more. I think this is why it has also been so well supported by parents. And, of course, everyone enjoyed dressing up as characters from their favourite stories. We had great fun guessing which book everyone's outfit was based on."
