Encouraging Your Child’s Reading for Pleasure: Our new school Reading Cloud now available online.

Dear Parent / Carer

Our school is strongly committed to improving literacy and knows the importance of reading for pleasure. There is good evidence to suggest that young people who read for pleasure daily perform better in reading tests. We want to encourage children to enjoy reading and to read a wide range of good quality literature.

I am delighted to inform you that the school has recently made a significant investment in our library with the introduction of a new online Reading Cloud. The new system allows pupils, staff and parents to view our school library catalogue online and pupils are encouraged to use this to help with research, to write reviews about books they have read, blog about what they are reading and their favourite authors and search for new books and other library resources.

Each class has been allocated an hour a week in the school library and every child will be able to take out a book of their choice from the school library to take home.

The system includes a fantastic new feature called ‘Who Next’ which recommends new books and authors based on the books that your child has already read. You will be able to use this feature at home to help your child select their next book.

You can access the system via the school website or directly using the following link: http://u002862.microlibrarian.net

If you have access to an iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Android phone, then you can also download a new App called ‘iMLS’ to access the library from those devices. The app is available from the App Store and Android Market.

Your child’s class teacher will give them their username and password.

Having the library accessible in this way and having parents engaged with reading, will help to support our commitment to improving literacy standards. Your child has been given their username and password which you can use to log in to the website and App.

We are very lucky to have the new library full of many new books. However, if a book is lost, there will be a charge of £5 to replace the book.

We hope you find the new facility useful and welcome any feedback.

Yours faithfully,

Mr Barlow