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Poole Poole

Competition winners - and Booky cake! - at the Booktime celebration event in Poole
Competition winners - and Booky cake! - at the Booktime celebration event in Poole

Discover how Booktime in Poole ran a competition throughout the local authority

What did they do?

  • Invited schools to visit the library with their Reception classes to celebrate Booktime

  • Ran an animal drawing competition with fantastic prizes sourced from local businesses

  • Held an award ceremony for the drawing competition winners, inviting whole families and making it a really special event with a Booky-shaped cake!


What do they say?

During our Library sessions we have linked Booktime with our Stories from the Web site. Children have been given a sheet adapted from the website and have taken it home in their Booktime packs to see if parents and carers could help them finish it. This has encouraged family learning as well as promoting our subscription to Stories from the Web.

 

We have also encouraged the children to enter an animal drawing competition. A couple of local businesses have donated some fantastic prizes. Each winner will receive one day's family pass to a very popular adventure farm park, along with an animal-themed book.

 

We hope that our work will encourage families to visit their local Library for pleasure and to support their lifelong learning. For many years we have endeavoured to visit every school in Poole to publicise the Summer Reading Challenge and Booktime now provides us with the same great outreach opportunity at the start of the school year. It is certainly a busy time for us - but we like a challenge!

 

How can we do it?

  • Make the Booktime books a hook for a whole series of activities

  • Prepare for Booktime early: Poole librarians contact schools at the start of term in September to invite them to visit

  • Use the skills you already have in your libraries team (like baking!) for special events

  • Prizes donated from local businesses make for brilliant competitions without needing a big budget

  • Link Booktime with a family reading project you're already running, to increase the impact of both – like Poole did with Stories from the Web

  • Involve parents and carers to strengthen local links