GARDENING CLUB UP & RUNNING

Great news! With the, hopefully, better weather approaching, our gardening club is now up and running. This year we are opening up the club to Years 7-12, and it will run on Tuesday and Thursday lunchtimes (weather permitting) in Pear Tree Gardens. Depending on interest, it may be necessary to have a weekly sign-up sheet.

The club is designed to boost mental and physical wellbeing, along with learning new skills and enjoying time in the outdoors. Students will work alongside Sixth Formers and staff to plant a variety of flowers, fruit and vegetables, with opportunities to get involved in some inter-house competitions.

Last year a lot of our time focussed on clearing the overgrown space and planting some quick-growing crops. This year we have some new raised beds ready to install, which will need painting, lining, filling and planting up. We also hope to create an accessible bed for students with mobility issues and in time, to also extend the planting to include a mini orchard and a wildflower garden, working alongside the Conservation Club. We advise students attending to bring a change of shoes (comfy, sturdy shoes, such as walking boots or trainers) and perhaps jogging bottoms - just in case they get muddy! Seasonal attire such as a water-proof jacket or sun hat are also recommended. Gardening gloves will be provided, although students may wish to provide their own.

Although we have a small budget towards plants and seeds, we would kindly welcome any donations of:

• Seeds and bulbs

• Small non-poisonous plants

• Fruit trees

• Outdoor wood paint (part tins that have been forgotten about at the back of sheds/ garages are welcomed)!

• Compost

• Empty compost bags or other plastic sheeting which could be used as raised bed liners

• Large plant pots (we already have a large stock of small plant pots and trays)

We hope to keep you up to date with pictures of our progress and details of the jobs we’ve been doing and what we’ve been planting. If you wish to get involved, make sure to get a parent/carer to complete the consent link on the letter that has been sent home about gardening club. If you have any questions, please come and find me.

Miss C. Hutton, Physics Teacher

school. Each month, our ambassadors work in their key stage teams to create book trailer videos for LGGS Books of the Month. These videos are shared in form time at the start of each month and are available to view under the Reading Ambassadors’ tab on the Library page of our website: www.lggs.org.uk/393/library the battle for women s rights in recognition ] of International Women’s Month. Earlier this month, students watched the book review videos for April, which look at the work of Muslim writers, in celebration of Eid. You can check out our April selection on the following pages … holiday reading inspiration!

Our Ambassador Team, pictured above, are working on some exciting projects, such as a KS3 school magazine and establishing book clubs for any year groups which don’t already have them. Reading Ambassadors are there to help students in their year groups with any reading-related queries. Ambassadors wear purple badges - so you can easily identify them. They are always more than happy to offer recommendations and advice or to signpost students in the right direction for further help.

Book Of The Month

Our book choices this month celebrate International Women’s History Day and our students have selected classic and contemporary writers which provides students with an opportunity to sample different eras and hopefully, satisfy everyone's taste.

KS3 BOOK OF THE MONTH: CLASSIC CHOICE

The Secret Garden

Mary Lennox is sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody says she is the most disagreeable looking child ever seen. It is true, too. Mary is pale, spoilt and quite contrary. But she is also horribly lonely. Then one day she hears about a garden in the grounds of the Manor that has been kept locked and hidden for years. And when a friendly robin helps Mary find the key, she discovers the most magical place anyone could imagine...

‘Mary is a tough feisty character, who manages to turn a whole household, and the lives of those in it, completely upside down ... The book is brim full of magic and joy.’

- Sunday Telegraph

KS3 BOOK OF THE MONTH: CONTEMPORARY CHOICE

The Secret Garden: From acclaimed performance poet, Sophia Thakur, comes a powerful first collection of poems exploring issues of identity, difference, faith, relationships, fear, loss and joy. Intricate, evocative and dazzling - these are poems that explore the experiences that connect people; they encourage readers to look within and explore the tendencies of the heart.

‘Sophia Thakur is one of the most brilliant and necessary voices from the UK. The power of her words will affect generations.’

- Angie Thomas

KS3 BOOK OF THE MONTH: CONTEMPORARY CHOICE

Things a Bright Girl can do: Through rallies and marches, in polite drawing rooms and freezing prison cells and the poverty-stricken slums of the East End, three courageous young women join the fight for the vote.

Evelyn is seventeen, and though she is rich and clever, she may never be allowed to follow her older brother to university. Enraged that she is expected to marry her childhood sweetheart rather than be educated, she joins the Suffragettes, and vows to pay the ultimate price for women's freedom.

May is fifteen, and already sworn to the cause, though she and her fellow Suffragists refuse violence. When she meets Nell, a girl who's grown up in hardship, she sees a kindred spirit. Together and in love, the two girls start to dream of a world where all kinds of women have their place. But the fight for freedom will challenge Evelyn, May and Nell more than they ever could believe. As war looms, just how much are they willing to sacrifice?

‘Nicholls has brought alive the young women of the past to empower the next generation.’

- Alex O'Connell, The Times

STAFF & SIXTH FORM KS5: CLASSIC CHOICE

Beloved: Set in the mid-1800’s in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Beloved chronicles the experiences of Sethe, abandoned by her sons and living with her youngest daughter in Cincinnati. Sethe’s is a house haunted by secrets; of the violent, traumatic memories of her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky and by shameful secrets that refuse to stay buried.

When another Sweet Home survivor, Paul D, appears at Sethe’s door, his arrival heralds the mysterious coming of a woman, calling herself only ‘Beloved’. As the revenant Beloved makes her home with Sethe, so her life becomes increasingly devoted both to her ever-increasing and contrary demands for love and her insatiable need for atonement.

This novel is ‘likely to mould or change a reader's sense of the world.’

- Jane Smiley, The Guardian

STAFF & SIXTH FORM KS5: CLASSIC CHOICE

The Sentence: A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store.

Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading 'with murderous attention,' must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning.

The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

‘In this stunning and timely novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich creates a wickedly funny ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman's relentless errors.’ - Waterstones

KS3 BOOK OF THE MONTH: CONTEMPORARY CHOICE

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again with these words a reader is swept up into a world of secrets and lies; one of the most passionate, psychologically twisting and complex stories of all-time.

Working as a lady's companion, the orphaned heroine, Rebecca, learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. Whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to his brooding estate, Manderley, on the Cornish Coast, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife, Rebecca, is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers ...

Never gone out of print since publication in 1938! In 2017, it was voted the nation’s favourite book from the past 225 years by WH Smith poll.

‘Her masterpiece ... seldom has a dead woman exercised such power beyond the grave. Rebecca will live for ever because du Maurier touches a fearful nerve, buried deep in the unconscious.’

- Kate Saunders, The Times