We are eagerly anticipating Library Week 2012 here at Hargest!  It has a firm place on our school events calender – Week 5 Term 3.  This year it’s the 13th-17th August.  

I have spotted plans afoot already within our Year 13 cohort as they pore over images of possible book characters for our annual Dress Up Day.  I have already challenged our staff to make sure they are not outdone by the students this year, as Team Staff certainly came out on top last year after Rob Bradley’s stunning Transformer’s Bumblee production.  Unfortunately Rob isn’t teaching at Hargest this year.  In fact, we just got a photo from him at the summit of Mt Everest – his big adventure this year.

So you may be wondering what on earth the photo above has to do with Library Week?  Well, this is the first photograph entered in our new competition for this year.  We always run some sort of photo competition during Library Week.  In the past we’ve done the “Guess which teacher is reading the book” competition and the “Guess which book this character comes from” competition.  This year the students will have to match the staff member to their bookcase. 

When I promoed this with staff on Wednesday I asked them to think about putting little clues into their photos (after first making sure they’d weeded their shelves appropriately!) to steer students in the right direction.  Within 24 hours I had my first entry!  Hence the photo at the beginning of this blog posting.  Our teacher in charge of Drama has contributed this superb effort. (Thanks Jo – you rock!)  I’ve already printed it out and put it up in the staffroom as an example and encouragement to the rest of our staff.

But wait …. there’s more ……!!  And this competition I didn’t even come up with!  One of our I.T teachers has approached me about running a competition leading up to Library Week, where all of her Y10 and 11 students can design this year’s Library Week posters.  I will be the “client” and go along to their classes to give them their briefing and the best of their efforts will be used next term to promote our Library Week.  Thanks Megan for creating another link between the library and the curriculum.

I’m really excited about this one! And I’m really excited about celebrating Library Week here at Hargest again.