WBD chat and PTA Book Club is GO!

Automatically generated from the audio, so it may not be perfectly word-for-word.

Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Yvonne, and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. But I'm just one of thousands of volunteers up and down the country who all want to make a difference to their schools. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in UK schools to boost budgets, and I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. Hello, hello. Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 40 of the PTA podcast. I am recording this episode from my car today because it is Monday, and on a Monday, I have to sit in my car and wait for one of my sons while they go to a club. My son plays the trombone in Windband, so he goes to wind band rehearsal on every Monday in term time, and I just wanted to really give a shout out to all the parents who do what I do occasionally and have to sit in their car while you wait for your child to be finished with a club. I look around the car park around me and I think I can see at least five other parents doing exactly the same as me. I did want to try and sit inside the room where Wind Ban Rehearsal was happening, but I didn't realise how loud a group of live musical instruments can be if you're sitting in the same room, only about two metres away from them. Obviously, I've heard live music before, but it's always been in a theatre or a music venue or something, so you're not sitting very close to the musicians. And when I tried it, I took some books to read because it's an hour, but I just could not concentrate at all on any reading or anything apart from the noise of the musical instruments. So I tried it once, realised I couldn't do it, and so now I sit in my car. And that's okay, it's not too bad when it's light outside and not too cold, but in the winter, in the dark, it is a bit grim. Um, I do sometimes even bring a hot water bottle that I put under my coat in the car because obviously I can't have the engine running for an hour, and I can't read because there's no light. So I figured out that if I bring my laptop I can do something offline because I have no internet, so I will try and use the time to do something productive. But yes, I just really wanted to give a shout out to any of you, and I'm sure there are many of you who also have to sit and wait for your child to finish a club. It's basically it's just too far for me to go back home and come back and get him. I would just be stuck in traffic going home and then stuck in traffic coming back to get him, so it's really not worth it, and so that's why I do it. Anyway, I have got time to record this podcast for my car this episode, so that's a very good use of my time, and I wanted to tell you how we got on with World Book Day because World Book Day was a couple of weeks ago. Uh, did you do any fundraising activities connected to books at all at your school? My school ran the Wonka Bar sales for the first time, and I think they were quite popular. This wasn't done through the PTA, so I'm not exactly sure how the sales panned out or how they really organised it. Uh, it was run directly from the school, and we bought some and my son enjoyed opening the Wonka Bar and seeing if he had won a golden ticket, which unfortunately he didn't, but but he enjoyed it anyway and certainly enjoyed eating the chocolate afterwards. Uh by the way, if you don't know what this is what this wonka bar things is, then if you go on Facebook and look on the PTA forums and search for Wonka bars, you'll see that lots of people have tried this fundraiser. So basically, you buy some chocolate bars. I think a popular one to pick is the 100 gram galaxy bar because the galaxy chocolate is wrapped in gold foil and it looks like the Wonka bars from the storybook or from the film of uh Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And most PTAs take off the piece of paper that's the outside wrapper which says Galaxy on it, and then you you replace that paper wrapper with a special printed wrapper of your own, which you can design and print yourself, um, or I think you can download them online. I haven't actually looked myself, but I have heard some people say that they do download them online. I don't know where my school got theirs from. Um so you can just design your own, print it out, and put it on, and then the idea is that in some of the chocolate bars, just as in the book, um, there are some golden tickets so you can win a prize, so you just slip a ticket underneath the wrapper so that the children can't see them when they get their chocolate bar. So I wasn't involved, but I think some of the prizes my school did were some book tokens, there was possibly some actual books, and then I think they did some of those in-school prizes, which is things like oh, you might get to sit on a chair in assembly um or get some extra playtime, you know, something like that. So that is what the Wonka bars fundraisers, if you didn't know. My school sold them for £2.50. I didn't know how much they paid for the chocolate bars, but I know that um chocolate at the moment is creeping up in price, so I hope they got a good deal and they have made some money on the Wonka bars. Um so in my last episode, episode 39, where I talked about treasure hunts, I described an escape room that we set up in the library for the children for World Book Day, and I can report back now that it was a huge success. We had small groups of children come in, I think the biggest group was 10 children, and we did allocate 15 minutes per group for them to solve four clues that we'd hidden around the room. We kept it really short, so there were only four clues because basically we didn't because we were having groups of children come in one after another, I think we in total we had maybe 16 groups or something, and we didn't want it to take all day because the school had organised for the children to do other activities on World Book Day, so we had to make sure that ours uh didn't take up lots and lots of time. Um and I have four librarians that I work with in the library, and they were all so enthusiastic, so they're all in year four, five, or six, and I could basically, once we'd got it all set up, I basically stood back and just let them lead the way with each group. They even came to school dressed up as Sherlock Holmes because the premise of our escape room was that a book had been stolen from the library and the groups of children had to discover which book was missing. So the librarians came dressed as Sherlock Holmes like detectives to set the scene for the escape room, and it was really very good, and they looked amazing. They'd made they'd gone to so much effort, I was really proud of them, and it was such a joy to watch the different groups of children figuring out the clues that we'd put in. So we did three different escape rooms for the different age groups. So we did one for reception in year one, a slightly harder one for year two and year three, and then years four, five, and six had a slightly harder one again. But even the youngest children in the reception class were working brilliantly as a team. I was watching them really carefully, and they supported each other and they encouraged each other, and I was actually really taken aback by the skills and even the empathy that children have at such a young age, it was so heartwarming, and I felt really privileged to witness it. I would have loved to have been one of their parents seeing them take part because it just really gives you such a warm glow to see. So everybody did manage to discover what the stolen book was, which was our aim. You didn't want anybody uh to leave not getting it right, and whilst we allocated 15 minutes for everyone, we didn't actually time them like you would in a normal escape room, we didn't put a timer on or anything because I felt like adding the time pressure would just add too much pressure and might make the children panic a bit, and then they might not finish in 15 minutes. So I didn't want to you know make them make them not able to complete the escape room. So, yes, it was a huge success, and the teachers even mentioned to me later in the day how much the children had enjoyed it. So, if you're looking to showcase your library, or as I said in episode 39, if you're looking to showcase a particular part of your school or a particular thing that your PTA has organised and funded, then putting on or making an event where people have to go into that space by using, for example, treasure hunt or an escape room or something, it's a really great way to showcase that to your families so they can actually really experience it and see what their money and donations have actually gone towards. So, yes, I would highly recommend organising something like that. And the other thing I wanted to tell you in this episode is that we are now starting our virtual book club. So this is the episode where I'm telling you that we are starting, and we're starting with the first book on the list of my website, which is The Hive by Jill Hornby, and we're going to have eight weeks from now to um well, if you if you guys can get a copy of the book, read it and then send me your views and opinions of the book. So that's eight weeks from now. Uh so now it's time to get started. So you can borrow the book from your library or um your local bookshop, or if you go to my website, there's some links where you can actually purchase the book online if you want to. I will be sending out an email on my mailing list to let you know how you can feedback your views and opinions on the book. So do join my mailing list if you want to get a direct email, but I'll I will also share it on my Facebook page. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to get your feedback yet. Uh feel free to just drop me an email and write your feedback, but I might try and structure it a little bit. I might make some sort of form or questionnaire that you can fill out, which might just help to focus the discussion on the book. So um yeah, do look out for that. Um, I really hope you enjoy reading it. I'm going to be reading it too because um I first read it quite a few years ago and I can't quite remember all the details about what happened. So I'm going to refresh my memory so I can also let you know what I thought about it. So this is the special announcement that the PTA Book Club is go. So go and get your hands on the book. I hope you enjoy reading it, and I hope you enjoy reading it knowing that there's other PTA volunteers reading it at the same time as you, and then we'll all come together to see what we thought about it. And that's all I really wanted to say for this very short episode. I hope your PTA events are going well at the moment. It's the run-up to Easter now, so if you're planning an egg hunt, I hope that it goes well. You might be looking to source some chocolate eggs at good prices, and uh yes, I just hope you manage to find some because I know how hard that can be. But let me know how your Easter fundraising is going. Drop me a line at hello at PTApodcast.com. You might want to listen back to a couple of episodes I recorded about Easter fundraising where I interviewed my sister-in-law Amelia, who lives in Sweden. I think it's episodes 15 and 16, where I talked to her about Easter fundraising that I'd done at my school, and she was talking about Easter fundraising she was doing in Sweden, which was really nice to hear just some different things that she was organising, and how um fundraising works in schools in Sweden as well. So uh, so you might like to listen to those, and I'll uh speak to you next episode. So bye from now,