In May 2023 6 of our lucky students had the rare and privileged opportunity to meet the incredible Benjamin Zephaniah, poet, actor and author of novels such as Refugee Boy and Face at Baysgarth Library.

Benjamin was promoting his new book Nature Trail but our students had the wonderful opportunity to meet him and ask him their questions about his inspiration for the novel Refugee Boy - a popular novel which we read in English in Year 7 at Baysgarth. Benjamin spent a significant amount of time with our students, discussing with them his views on refugees, reading, society and what it's like to be a writer - he answered all their questions carefully and considerately. Benjamin also signed our students' copies of Refugee Boy with personalised message and then posed for photos with them.

It was a once in a lifetime experience for our students to meet Benjamin Zephaniah especially as he does so few meet and greets - we're sure our students will always remember what a special occassion it was!

In April 2022 a group of Year 7 students participated in a ‘Doodletastic’ workshop with author and illustrator Jen Carney in partnership with the ‘Reading Pictures, Seeing Stories’ programme with North Lincolnshire Libraries. They were able to design a range of images inspired by their names and different characters featured in Jen Carney’s novels ‘The Accidental Diary of B.U.G’. The group were also able to listen along to extracts from Jen Carney’s latest novel which she read aloud to them.

The students had a brilliant time, asked some thoughtful and interesting questions and were a credit to the school. In particular the biscuit challenge went down a treat with our students!

In partnership with Scunthorpe United and Study United, a group of KS3 Baysgarth students have been lucky enough to represent Baysgarth school in this exciting reading programme! The Study United Centre aims to provide a stimulating environment for learning using football to motivate the pupils and raise standards in literacy.

Our students have had the privilege of attending Glanford Park on a number of occasions, meeting football players, taking part in games which link football and reading as well meeting and interviewing author Tom Palmer as well as creating raps with poet and rap artist Breis!

The group will be creating their own match reports and will soon be delivering them in front of the green screen- just like a true Sky Sports reporter!

In school, the students take part in bi-weekly sessions which develop their love of reading and writing, provide them with time to read Tom Palmer’s book Ghost Stadium and allow them to prepare for their sessions at Glanford park.

The programme will culminate in an inter-school football tournament and awards ceremony. 

Go Team Baysgarth!

To celebrate 25 years of World Book Day, students were challenged to ‘Chase World Book Day’ and locate 12 posters hidden across the school to win House Points and the House challenge. We have never seen our students so determined to search every nook and cranny of our school building!

A whole school competition was also launched which required students to guess who the mystery readers were, hidden behind our Collective Reading novels. There were certainly divided opinions as to who the mystery readers were!

The school also leapt into the celebratory spirit on the day itself as every student and Collective Reading Lead enjoyed a chocolate Freddo during Collective Reading time at the end of the day.

We can’t wait for further celebrations next year!

It was Holocaust memorial Day on Thursday 27th January. To mark the occasion, the author Liz Kessler did a Zoom meet and greet where she spoke about her latest novel 'When the World was Ours' (inspired by a true story of 3 friends living during WWII) to KS3 students in our region. Baysgarth school was selected to be given enough copies of the novel for every single child in Year 7 to take home, read and keep! Liz Kessler signed every single copy too which was an added privilege for our students.

Our English staff said how fabulous the Zoom session was with Liz and commented on how engrossed the students were with the topic and then their new novels.

It’s not just our students who get to enjoy the benefits of reading. We hosted our very first ‘Blind Date with a Book’ swap in the Summer of 2021 with staff wrapping up one of their favourite books and writing an intriguing summary on it as to the content of the story. Staff were then invited to choose their brand new novel based on the cryptic clue. There was no way our staff could judge a book by its cover! 

Despite being in lockdown, nothing was going to stop us from celebrating World Book Day at Baysgarth school! 

Alongside a masked reader competition - which was held on our social media channels - we also delivered World Book Day themed activities in school for our Key Worker students and for the Home Learning too.

For our ‘Masked Reader’ competition members of our community could guess who was hiding behind the “masks” as they happily enjoyed their books. In school, our students were able to create character inspired bookmarks in their art lessons and at home students were challenged to create either: a ‘Bookflix’ montage, a ‘Book in a box’ or a brand new book cover for their favourite novel.

See the winning students below!