Fact: everyone needs to be able to count. But in Sendak’s world, it’s not to count boring stuff like money or marbles or fingers. You need to count to be able to keep track of the crazy shit that keeps bursting into your house. How else will you know when the tiger selling clothes shows up? Also, what kind of crappy robber just takes a shoe? That turtle’s probably worth way more on the black market, man.
Evelyn Grace Academy wins Stirling Prize
The Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, has been given the Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize.
It beat the favourite, the London 2012 Olympic velodrome. Hadid has now won the Stirling for two years in a row.
“An opportunity to broaden the educational diversity of this active and historic London area. Following the principle of ‘schools within schools’, the design generates natural patterns of division within highly functional spaces which give each of the four smaller schools a distinct identity, both internally and externally.” - Zaha-hadid.com
This is where I work. The library is the best part of course!
Comic Master
I really want to use this tool with a class soon.
Olympics & Euro 2012 
New research from Bristol and Oxford universities has shown that when a country is heavily involved in international sports, its school pupils’s academic results are significantly worse.
Given that we have both Euro 2012 & the Olympics ahead, I’ve produced both a Euro 2012 and an Olympic Reading & Writing Packs and a letter for schools to send home with Top Ten Tips for Parents on using Sport to encourage children to read, so hopefully this year, we can help children be this summer’s Reading Champions.
Click here for more
School libraries in the 21st century.
—Alan Gibbons
My dream desk.
(via libraryphantomg5)
I managed to get the ARK libraries features in their ARK’s magazine, The Arrow!
There’s a whole page about my beautiful library! Hurrah! Fame at last!
You can read the full thing here.
RIP Maurice Sendak (June 10, 1928 – May 8, 2012) Thanks for never talking down to kids.
(Source: nevver, via fuckyeahreading)
Badaude’s London Walks. I bought this on Free Comics day at Gosh Comics. The students would love this and hopefully it would get a few of them to explore London, instead of staying within a 1/2 mile of their homes.
Our students are honestly the best.
I have been very busy this last year with my Masters at UCL, teaching all year seven students, organising training events and generally running around like a headless chicken. In the last few weeks I’ve become much more organised and have more time to get things done. I will start posting on here and also on my twitter: @missedutton
I have lots to share soon, including new displays, information from a CILIP/National Literacy Trust training day and photos of a magazine article about my library!
Poetry Class
I do the same poetry class with all year seven students. It’s so easy and they love it.
1 - Ask the students to explain what a poem is.
2 - Show the above video
3 - Ask them how his performance enhanced the poem
4 - Give all students a random poetry book (Print out some easy/fun poems too for fussy students)
5 - give them X amount of time to find a poem and practice it
6 - Performance time!
We’ve had students turning poems into songs, raps, plays and we’ve had the strangest sounds come out of the shyest students! I love this class!
