Children and young people have been escaping the lockdown blues thanks to BorrowBox, a digital library service offering eBooks and eAudiobooks.
Introduced in Falkirk schools two years ago, BorrowBox is managed by Children’s Services Learning Resource Service and covers age groups 5 – 13 years. The Service has seen the number of users surge during the lockdown period from 1,260 to 4,800.
Yvonne Manning, Principal Librarian says: “The response from schools has been fantastic and we’ve had lots of positive feedback on the impact BorrowBox has had on pupils generally, and especially on reluctant readers and pupils who require some additional support.
"Boys seem to engage better with eBooks and eAudiobooks and it’s very rewarding to hear from teachers and families that boys are discovering the joy of reading through BorrowBox.
"We’ve invested more of our budget to increase the content and to support learning at home. The next development will be to look at adding books suitable for young people in S3 – S6.”
Pupils can access BorrowBox through their Glow username and password and there’s handy sign in guides available on You Tube for different devices and browsers.
Yvonne added: “Our collection is mainly fiction and the most popular authors include David Walliams, Roald Dahl and JK Rowling. We add books regularly to maintain a current and exciting collection and we use Twitter to highlight other titles and authors to help introduce pupils to try out the full collection.”
"One of the many exciting aspects of BorrowBox is the facility to publish local content which can then be borrowed. We’ve recently published three books – The Wheel, a book written by children and young people about the theme of identity; Parker’s Positive Poetry, a selection of lockdown poems by pupils from Comely Park Primary School and The Dragon, written by P5 pupils from Bainsford Primary School.
"Reading for enjoyment has a powerful impact on children and young people’s learning and life chances. We hope that many more children will sign up to BorrowBox so they can enjoy the huge range of eBooks and eAudiobooks available opening up a whole world of stories and helping them to be ready for learning in August.”
Join in the fun with the Silly Squad!
The annual Summer Reading Challenge is running now and the theme this year focuses on silly and funny stories. The Challenge encourages children to continue reading for enjoyment over the holidays and the Learning Resource Service has added a selection of books to BorrowBox to support the Challenge.