Culture of reading at Scoil Aonghusa JNS

A TALLAGHT school was chosen out of over 600 applicants to receive a Robert Dunbar Memorial Award from Children’s Books Ireland, which recognises the work the school does to promote the culture of reading.

Scoil Aonghusa Junior National School in Balrothery was chosen for the prestigious award, receiving a library of 300 books for the school and workshops for the pupils with a children’s author and illustrator.

Speaking to The Echo about the win, Deputy Principal Jean McAdam said: “The award is named after Robert Dunbar, who was an advocate for children’s literature, so the award is named after him to honour him.

“It is all about what you do as a school to promote reading in the school, and that is what you have to put into the application form.”

Scoil Aonghusa prides themselves on promoting and encouraging reading amongst the pupils strongly and believe it is important to provide a good foundation and interest for the children that they can build on throughout their lives.

“We are right beside Castletymon Library, and we have great links with them,” said Ms McAdam.

“We organise after-school book clubs, we do story-time at night with the teachers and they all come in their pyjamas and drink hot chocolate and listen to stories in the evening.

“We try our best to promote reading in a fun way.”

Author Alan Nolan with Brandon

The library of books was presented to the school by author Alan Nolan on Tuesday, May 31, which was met with great excitement from the pupils at the school.

Alan will come in to do illustrating and writing workshops with the children over five days as part of the prize.

“It is a brilliant prize, and it has created a bit of a buzz in the school – all of the kids are so delighted and love the idea of looking through all of these new books and picking out what they want to read,” said Ms McAdam.

“It is all about creating an atmosphere around reading and promoting it as something fun and enjoyable.

We are a junior school and the children here are very much on their journey to learning how to read and we really see that as an important step in their lives – what we do really has an influence on their relationship with reading and we take that quite seriously.

“We want to enable our kids to become good readers so we want to lay the foundations for that in the school.”