Read Manchester Winter Newsletter

Marcus Rashford's book giveaway kicks off!

See Myself in Books

We recently launched a drive to help schools promote wider diversity and representation in children's literature. See Myself in Books is a 25-book collection for primary schools that reflects an ethnically diverse range of characters, authors and illustrators, as well as a wider range of story settings.

For this project, we will work with 24 schools across the city. Half the participating schools teach a pupil population where over 95% of pupils are from ethnically diverse backgrounds, while the other half of the schools have ethnic diversity at the opposite end of the scale: See Myself in Books’ aim is that local children from all backgrounds can see diverse representation in books.

As well as receiving a collection of books, schools will be offered meet-the-author sessions with authors / illustrators who are representative of our ethnically diverse communities in Manchester. This project is supported by VINCI Construction UK.

For more details and to view the booklist, visit See Myself in Books project launches | National Literacy Trust

Book gifting

It’s been another bumper few months for Read Manchester’s book gifting campaign. In December we gave away 18373 new books and 2564 magazines to children and young people across the city. This figure takes our total to 85313 books and 12142 magazines gifted locally since the first lockdown was announced in March 2020. We’re only 2245 off the big 100000! 

Our Christmas campaign was once again focused on gifting books via organisations who work closely with local families. Many of these are food banks and community groups that have supported families through some of the toughest of times:

‘We work with people who have very little money to spend beyond the basics. especially after Covid. Making books available as well as food has been such a blessing.  Each one offered has been received gratefully’. (Openshaw Salvation Army Foodbank)

Literacy Champions

We are looking for Manchester residents to become Literacy Champions! Literacy Champions want to help improve literacy in their community, can support in person or online and will be provided with training to get up and running. As families cope with the challenges of education disruptions and social distancing, Literacy Champions reach out to their communities, encouraging and inspiring them to engage with literacy.

Find out more about this opportunity here. 

Wythenshawe Park story trail

Our Wythenshawe Park story trail remains available for the public to enjoy! Families are invited to follow the trail map around the park, enjoying the story interactively as it is revealed bit by bit, at each point on the map. More information about the trail can be found here and you can read about the story trail launch here.

The trail was designed by local illustrator Ian Morris, whose book The Library Book is available in book shops and Manchester Libraries.

We are very excited to be continuing our partnership with Ian Morris, with the launch of a library card competition in February! Children will be invited to design a library card, with the winning design being printed on library cards and many more fabulous prizes to be won… keep an eye out for this next month.

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