Read Manchester May newsletter

Read Manchester Book gifting programme

#Take10ToRead campaign

On May 10th, Read Manchester and Connecting Stories launched a further ‘Take 10 to drop everything and read’ challenge. Businesses, schools and partners across the city stopped what they were doing at 10am to find ten minutes to read for wellbeing. Over 26,000 individuals across the city of Manchester took part! Primary schools who registered for the event were also able to join a virtual author event with Anthony Horowitz.

Watch our #Take10 video here as well as this video from Manchester Youth Council's #Take10 celebrations!

Connecting Stories

In partnership with Z-Arts, Connecting Stories Manchester were delighted to launch an online exhibition on May 3rd which you can visit by clicking here! The exhibition features a gallery of writing from 7-14 year olds across the city who entered the ‘Local Heroes’ themed creative writing competition.

In addition to the showcase of children’s writing in the exhibition, Connecting Stories will also be printing approximately 1000 copies of the children and young people’s work in print. The anthologies will be distributed to participating schools, library services and community partners over the summer. All entrants who feature will receive a personal copy of the book.

Reading map

In 2020, Read Manchester launched a Reading Map resource in partnership with Transport for Greater Manchester. The design is based on the iconic Manchester Metrolink but the twist is that children find a new book to read in place of every Metrolink stop! Every Manchester school child in years 5 and 6 received a copy of the map.

Three of the schools who responded to our feedback survey were the lucky winners of a set of 62 reading map books - Armitage CE Primary school, St Wilfrid’s CE Aided Primary School and Unity Community Primary School. Read more, including what the schools had to say about the map here!

Summer Reading Challenge

Read Manchester and Manchester Libraries are busy preparing for this year's Summer Reading Challenge The Wild World Heroes. The Summer Reading Challenge is the biggest annual reading promotion for children and this year it is based on an environmental and nature theme.  Manchester is one of ten Local Authorities in the country to work with The Reading Agency to pilot a new model of delivery with schools. 16,000 children from forty primary schools will join the Challenge directly through their schools and will also automatically be signed up as library members. Libraries will continue to offer virtual and in-person class visits to all schools in the city before the Challenge launches on 5 July.

Evidence shows that the Challenge is an effective Covid recovery tool, encouraging reading for pleasure over the summer holidays, building reading skills and confidence, and helping to prevent the 'dip' in reading skills while children are out of school.

Summer events

Connecting Stories and Read Manchester are planning some exciting outdoor events to encourage reading for pleasure and are looking forward to announcing our plans for these over the next month! We will be holding a ‘Look for a Book’ event in Wythenshawe Park on Saturday 3rd July - more details to be announced shortly.

SUMO Guy

SUMO Guy Paul McGee met with high schools this week in sessions coordinated by Read Manchester. In these sessions, he worked with young people to ‘get more out of themselves, get more out of others and get more out of life.' See SUMO for more details about Paul’s writing and work.

Based on his new book Yesss! Paul shared strategies to support mental wellbeing and PSHE to help build resilience, confidence and motivation. Read Manchester also supplied 25 free copies of Yesss! per session.

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