Read Manchester Late Autumn Newsletter

Festive Book Gifting Appeal 

Transition Read

For a third successful year, Read Manchester has gifted a book to every child making the transition to high school this September. Working with over 150 primary schools, we gifted 8,000 Year 6 pupils a copy of the Transition Read to delve into over the summer holidays. Our choice this year was ‘The Lion Above the Door’ by the phenomenal Onjali Q Rauf and for Manchester’s SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) children, the empowering ‘My Skin, Your Skin’ by Laura Henry-Allain, illustrated by Oniyinye Iwu. Both titles provide food for thought exploring issues of race, culture, and anti-racism. Find out more here.

Summer Book Gifting 

During the summer many of the city’s libraries, play schemes and holiday activity providers hosted the Holiday Activities and Food programme for young people. Read Manchester is proud to have provided books, magazines, and resources for these schemes and for many other community projects and events operating throughout the school holidays. Over 11,500 books were given to children over the summer period. In the last year we have gifted 75,000 brand new books. A huge thank you to all our partner organisations, publishers, and individuals who provide support, funding, and books!  

Design a Library Card Competition Winners

The winners of each of the three categories for Our Year, Our Card design competition were invited to Central Library in October for a special presentation by Read Manchester and one of the judges, Manchester’s very own talented illustrator Ian Morris. The day was a momentous success and even garnered a write up on the BBC News website. You can read more about the winners and their day to remember on our blog. Well done to the winning designers and thank you to all the entrants and the judges who had a difficult job on their hands. The new children’s library card designs are in circulation across our libraries now. 

Take 10 to Read! 

At 10am on October 10th as part of Mental Health Awareness Week we took a moment to encourage people to look after their wellbeing by immersing themselves in a book for 10 minutes a day. This year we also set up stall in Central Library and gifted books to library visitors. Many of our partners also took the time to #Take10ToRead and took to social media to prove it! Do you Take 10 yourself? Reading regularly has been shown to have positive benefits on our health and wellbeing, as well as boosting literacy. 

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