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| What's New |
Our new “Telling Tales” project | East Midlands Story-Go-Round | Win a Mini First Hatchback 1.6 | The Car Crash | Christmas Fundraising | Amazing volunteers | Welcome Stuart and Camilla | Objects needed | 2009 in figures | Y Dywysoges Fach | BBC Radio 4 Appeal Our new “Telling Tales” project Our new Telling Tales project got under way before Christmas. The project, which is funded by the Big Lottery Fund, aims to train librarians in multi-sensory storytelling by mentoring them at six storytelling sessions throughout the year. The first session simply gives the librarians the chance to observe a trained storyteller using Bag Books for a storytelling session with children from a local Special School. As the sessions go on, the librarians do increasingly more of the storytelling themselves, until they are confident enough to arrange and run the sessions themselves once the project is over. In the first year, the project is covering four regions of England and our Storyteller- Trainers are: Nina Martinez for London; Bernard Tagliavini for the South East; Kathie Johnston for the South West; with Justine de Mierre and our Director of Services, Stuart Cummings, taking on the East between them. In September, the second year of the project will see it expanded to the rest of England and we are currently busy recruiting Storyteller-Trainers for the remaining five regions. We will then have a total of nine regions each with ten sets of trainee librarians and each planning six Storytelling sessions – that’s 540 extra sessions on top of the 290 odd we usually do in a year. Comments from the Librarians currently being trained include:
In the photograph above, a librarian practices their multi-sensory storytelling at Chippenham Library. The story being told is “Gran’s Visit”, one of our oldest stories and last year’s best-seller. Here the letterbox rattles and a letter arrives from Gran saying she’s coming to stay.
Bernard, our Story-Go-Round storyteller has been out on the road again, this time taking multi-sensory storytelling to the East Midlands. The tour covered sessions from Leeds to Luton, visiting 23 different libraries, and providing storytelling sessions for 33 different schools and 364 children and young people with learning difficulties. Bernard also carried out 16 “taster” training sessions, training 239 people. The schools taking part were all Special Schools from within the region and each school group enjoyed a selection of our multi-sensory stories being read by Bernard. The training sessions explain some of the background to Bag Books, the theory behind the products, a guide to running your own multi-sensory storytelling sessions and also include an opportunity to practice telling the stories. Our Director of Services, Stuart Cummings, managed to get out to the sessions in Leicester, and was impressed with Bernard’s energy and enthusiasm. He also spoke to many librarians who were keen to follow-up the day by getting multi-sensory storytelling going in their libraries. One trainee said, “This was a super session. I had no idea what to expect. It was very engaging and enjoyable. Bernard clearly delivered and explained the reasoning behind what was done. Thank you.” A teacher added, "Excellent storyteller. I have worked in special education for 11 years and have never seen better - such fantastic responses from the children - thank you. Many thanks to all our Tour funders including The Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation, The True Colours Trust, The Hilton in the Community Foundation and The Baily Thomas Charitable Fund. Our next Story-Go-Round tour will take place in Scotland in September.
Our Storyteller, Bernard Tagliavini, in action.
Win a Mini First Hatchback 1.6 Following the success of last year’s raffle, Bag Books is once again taking part in the draw organised by The Foundation for Social Improvement (FSI). The FSI Small Charity Car Draw is helping small charities like Bag Books a no-risk way to raise money and it’s offering our supporters a chance to win a fabulous brand new Mini First Hatchback 1.6, kindly supported by Zurich.
Tickets cost £2 each and if you buy them from Bag Books we will receive 95.2% of every ticket sold (the FSI take just 4.8% for their administrative costs). You can buy them online at http://www.thefsi.org/charityprofile/bag-books or we also have a supply of traditional paper tickets available, contact Dean Casswell, Bag Books, 1 Stewart's Court, 218 - 220 Stewart's Road, London SW8 4UB for details.
The Car Crash is our latest story that has just gone into production. The story, aimed at teenagers and adults, is about Sam, a blind person who witnesses a car crash, goes to help and calls for an ambulance. It was written by our former Director, Chris Fuller. The story pack includes objects such as a paramedic’s bag, a stiff-neck collar and a spinal board. Bag Books was helped with the design of these items by visiting Wimbledon ambulance station. Duty Station Officer Taff Roberts said: “The charity contacted us asking if we could help them to create a true-to-life story involving an ambulance, and then visited us to feel all the equipment and check the terminology we use. The finished product is incredible, I’m amazed how much the craft artists have been able to recreate.” The story was trialled at Breakspeare School in Abbots Langley, Hertfordshire, with students especially liking the ambulance siren. Our thanks go to the London Ambulance Service for their advice and to The Hedley Foundation for funding the costs involved in creating this new multi-sensory story.
Dean Casswell, Bag Books’ Chief Executive demonstrates one of the pages to Taff Roberts and Gemma Wardell from the London Ambulance Service.
Many thanks to everyone who purchased our Christmas Stickers. We had orders totalling just under £250 plus a further £300 in donations. For the second year running, the Anscomb family in Peacehaven made a donation to Bag Books in lieu of sending Christmas Cards – what a wonderful idea and thanks very much. We had a very nice surprise from HSBC when they also decided to make a donation instead of sending cards. They rang out the blue and we initially thought it was just the local branch and were staggered when we learnt it was the whole UK and the donation would be £30,000! Thank you so much. We also benefitted from many of our supporters doing their Christmas Shopping online via the links on our website www.bagbooks.org In the three months up to Christmas, the link to Amazon earnt us £115.43 commission and the link to Buy.at raised £89.57. Again, thanks to everyone who helped.
The number of volunteer days donated to Bag Books increased from 80 in 2008 to 186 last year. This has made a fantastic difference to us and we would particularly like to thank Grace Loi, Steve Holmes, Susie Riches, Nee, Nadège Gallard and Reza Rad who joined our long-standing volunteers Mrs Oakley and Mary Atkinson. In addition, we were grateful to the teams of corporate volunteers from Linklaters, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Ashurst and Credit Suisse. This year we are benefitting from the services of three new volunteers, Abigail Maware, Helen Boyd and Patrick O’Callaghan. Many thanks to all our wonderful volunteers.
We are pleased to welcome two new members of staff to the Bag Books team: Stuart Cummings, Director of Services . Camilla John, Corporate Fundraising Manager
Many of our stories make use of recycled items – you can help us by collecting items such as old keys, magazines and sardine tins. We are currently particularly short of old aerosol tops For more details see our website http://www.bagbooks.org/objectsneeded.html Many thanks to “Gorgeous Jack” of Europa Trimmings who donated £200 worth of zips for use with the sleeping bags in our “It’s Cold INSIDE” story.
During 2009 we ran 288 storytelling sessions for a total of 1,238 people with learning disabilities. All 32 of the schools responding to our survey following their participation in our Story-Go-Round tours thought that the children had benefitted from the storytelling sessions. We trained 501 people in multi-sensory storytelling. Our dedicated Craft Artists pulled out all the stops and, together with our volunteers, managed to increase book production by 8% to 996 books. Our website attracted 47,122 distinct visits – a 68% increase on 2008. Financially, our income increased by 30%, whilst expenditure overall decreased by 11% and expenditure on fundraising decreased by 27%. This has boosted our reserves and given us the confidence to budget for a 39% increase in expenditure during 2010.
Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson launched our first multi-sensory book to be translated into Welsh at the National Eisteddfod in August. Our story “The Little Princess” was translated by the charity Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin to become “Y Dywysoges Fach”. It tells the tale of a Princess who is lonely until a kitten comes to stay. The kitten gets lost but is eventually found and rescued and they live happily ever after! “This is the first of our books to be translated into Welsh and it’s a very exciting step for us,” said Dean Casswell, our Chief Executive. “We hope that this will be the first of many translations.”Siân Owen, Director for Inclusion for Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin said, “This is a wonderful multi-sensory story which allows all children to enjoy story time - especially those children with additional needs.” Dame Tanni, the 11-times Paralympic gold medal winner and 6-times London Marathon winner, read the story in Welsh to a group of children visiting Mudiad Ysgolion Meithrin’s unit at the Eisteddfod. She said, ““I love books and reading with my daughter, and now children and adults with profound disabilities will be able to experience the pleasure that books can bring. What a wonderful resource for interaction and inclusion.”
The Actor and Comedian, John Sessions, recorded a Radio 4 Appeal for Bag Books which was broadcast in November 2008. In his appeal he told the story of Emily, who was helped to begin learning and communicating with her favourite Bag Books story, "The Little Princess". If you missed the broadcast you can visit the BBC website where you can listen to it again. If you wish to donate, you can make a credit/debit card donation via the CharityChoice website. We also have details of how you can make a donation by cheque. Over £16,000 has been raised - many thanks to all of our supporters.
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