“Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.” - Jane Smiley

Here at St Malachy's we know that reading is very important, and we love to celebrate reading for pleasure.

Last week was a very special Reading Week for all our Junior pupils. We read in English classes throughout the week, and everyone has also had an opportunity to visit our Book Fair and purchase a new book or two if they wished.

One of the highlights of the week was the Reading Celebration for Year 8 pupils. This year, the Celebration took place in the College Hall on Wednesday. A range of readers, both staff and pupils, participated, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Everyone who read spoke briefly about what they love to read, and why they chose the particular extract they read to us. Miss Artherton read an extract from Roald Dahl's "The Witches", and then Mr McGuinness read from Sir Alex Ferguson's autobiography. A wonderfully vivid reading from Lemony Snicket followed; this was by Matthew McGowan, one of our Upper Sixth pupils. We then enjoyed another reading from Dahl by Mr Davison, who chose his extract from "Danny, Champion of the World". Our final reading, by Miss Hughes, was a thrilling scene from Alex Rider.

Our thanks to everyone who participated in the event and shared their love of reading with us.

As part of our commitment to reading in St Malachy's, we are very pleased to announce two programmes this year which are designed to help Junior boys improve their reading skills. One, the Reading Programme, will begin this week: this enables a number of Junior pupils to read three times a week to Senior pupils. We trialled this programme on a smaller scale last year and were delighted by its success; we look forward to even more improvements this year.

Our second reading programme will be the Accelerated Reader programme, for all Year 8 boys, to encourage everyone to read as much as possible and to enjoy and take note of what they read. This programme will begin in December.

As we look forward to another wonderful year of reading ahead, I leave you with some sound advice for us all from the creator of Harry Potter:

“The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.” - J. K. Rowling.