Today is World Book Day

0:00As many parents might know, today is World Book Day. pupils in County Longford have discovered a new love of reading thanks to a project where everyone in the local community read the same book. At the same time, our Midlands correspondent, Chenette Hossi, spoke to some of the children from St Mary's and St John's National Schools in Edgeworth's town about what they thought of it. I loved it because it brought our school together and we worked as a team to read it and I loved how me and my sister, when we came back, we were talking about what chapter we were on. We just brought a whole class together and it made everybody more fond of reading. Sometimes when you read books alone, it's quite boring but with the class which friends, that's nice. I think that's what made it better because you weren't reading it alone. You had a group of people to read with. Yeah, I enjoyed reading the book because it's interesting and though I don't even like reading books but this book is interesting and I'm so curious to know

1:01if there's another book like this. Librarian at Edgeworth's town library, Kim Taylor joins us now. Kim, it was lovely to hear the enthusiasm there. Tell us about the book and about why you chose it. Good afternoon Rachel. Well, we chose the book, the case of the vanishing painting by Brian Gallagher. In my spare time, I review books for children's book Ireland and promoting Irish authors and Irish publishing is something I feel very strongly about and I previously have reviewed some of Brian Gallagher's books and I shortlisted it down to three books and when we were chatting to the school, the teachers reviewed the three books and they picked this one because they felt that it was a mystery and that it appeared to a wider range and it isn't tied to just one specific team. It was for everybody in the audience basically. Tell us then about the impact because listening to those clips there gathered by Shanaid, it sounds as though they all enjoyed the experience.

2:02Yeah, absolutely. There's some wonderful statements there from all the children. I suppose we did a survey over the before we started the project. There's 350 pupils between the two schools in Edgeworth's town and we found out 115 were active members, 180 were non-members and another 180, their membership had lapsed. Everyone always thinks that a library membership is for life but unfortunately it's only an annual membership. So end award, the home school liaison officer from St Mary's National School mentioned to me that they had ran a one book town project about 15 years ago and it got us thinking about how could we make this work again in the town and get the whole town reading together and basically it stemmed from there. We had numbers of meetings, discussions with the schools and the teachers and we decided to take the project beyond the classroom walls and place the library at the centre of the project and we decided to basically put the long-for-library stamp on it

3:05and the goal was to create a shared reading experience for the town and that's exactly what happened. Well, it's a lovely idea and I'm glad they enjoyed it. Thanks so much for talking to us this afternoon that was Kim Taylor from the library in Edwards Town and County Longfowl.