Last Saturday a group of ten intrepid explorers from across the school went on a trip to London’s Olympia to attend the Young Adult Literature Convention. This was an event that our wonderful Librarian and published Young Adult Author, Miss Rahman, has attended in the past and was attending on Sunday to be part of an Author’s Book Panel on Young Adult Literature and mental health and to sign books. We got the train into and across London and had a great time buying a LOT of books, getting things signed by authors, snaffling up any freebies going from the publishers’ stalls and watching authors’ panels discussing the role of social media in modern young adults literature, fantasy writing, how they get their inspiration and ideas for their stories and how they became published authors. Our tickets also got us into Comicon (a comic convention) downstairs and so we also enjoyed wandering past people in full dress-up as Chewbacca, Darth Vada, Ghostbusters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Cheerleaders and many, many Eddie Munsons from Stranger Things. Sadly Mrs McPartlin did not have time to queue to meet Hopper (also from Stranger Things), but perhaps he might have disappointed in real life anyway.

Thank you to the impeccable behaviour of the students and to Miss Rahman for accompanying us.

Please do encourage your children to keep up their reading over the summer holidays. Did you know that:

Children who DO NOT READ over the summer holidays can lose 3 months of reading skills between now and September.
Kids who DO READ tend to gain 1 month of reading skills and much more for some children.

If they could aim for two books over the holidays, that would be fantastic. My top tips are Eagle of the Ninth for Year 7, Scythe for Year 8 and Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman for Year 9 and of course, Why is Nobody Laughing? by our very own Yasmin Rahman.

Happy Summer Reading!!!

Mrs McPartlin.