Puffin Grants 2019: catch up!

Back in July, to celebrate Puffin’s upcoming 80^th Anniversary, we offered $20,000 worth of grants to NZ booksellers with a grand master plan to get kids reading!

Four brilliant ideas were born out of this scheme and it’s been so exciting to see them start to come to fruition.

We caught up with each bookseller to discuss how their Puffin initiatives are coming along!

The Children’s Bookshop (Wellington):

The Children’s Bookshop presented a plan to run reader programmes in teenage parent units throughout their region. Our judging panel loved that this idea had the potential to impact not just one, but two generations of young readers!

The books for the 70+ young parents and their babies have now been delivered and are ready for distribution! Each mother will receive a copy of With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo. It’s an inspiring novel about a teen still at school who has a baby, and how she juggles and struggles with her workload, future career choices and various family dramas.

There are four teen dads at HHT who will receive Lion: Long Way Home. The children will receive three books each.

The remaining money from the grant will be used to buy an assortment of picture books for the three crèche libraries and some YA fiction/non-fiction for the teen unit libraries!

The first reading session will be held at the teenage parent unit attached to Waiopehu College in Levin on Tuesday October 15^th. Stay tuned!

Some of the books parents at the units will receive for their children!

Masterton Paper Plus:

Masterton Paper Plus aimed to reach young readers (and their families) in their rural community by partnering with local schools to run a series of carefully planned literacy nights in store.

Using the grant to host a further three literacy nights so far, their initiative continues with increasing frequency and growing renown within their community! Since being awarded the grant, another 300 rural based kids have stormed the shelves of Masterton Paper Plus, aided and abetted by the dedicated staff who ably match the right books with the right kids.

Mums and dads take home an awful lot of books as well! Now the town schools have begun requesting their own nights, and we have a further four schools booked in over the next three months.

From Warwick at Masterton Paper Plus:

“So the Paper Plus Literacy Nights are very well known throughout our Wairarapa school community. The schools are thoroughly enjoying them, and more importantly, kids are getting ‘hooked’ on books. We’re doing our best to make reading cool!”

Some photos from Masterton Paper Plus' Literacy Nights!

Time Out Bookstore (Auckland):

Time Out’s application for the Puffin grants described a reading challenge with a difference. Aimed at local schools and with an emphasis on making books accessible to children in ‘bookless’ homes, although the concept was relatively simple we were impressed by the specific nature of what Time Out were hoping to achieve with their idea.

From Cait at Time Out:

‘The Time Out Big Read is in full swing at McAuley High School! Eager Year Nine readers have embarked on our adventurous reading challenge and are well on their way to earning a summer reading subscription, all thanks to our Puffin Grant. The first fifteen students to complete Big Read task received mystery books as spot prizes.’

UBS Canterbury:

The proposal UBS Canterbury put together cleverly targeted struggling readers, primarily by providing resources (Puffin Book Packs containing books, stationery, teacher resources, activities and discount vouchers) to support RTLB’s (Resource Teacher: Learning Behaviour) working in local schools.

As part of the application, UBS ran a trial of the initiative with five teachers. The grant saw them able to extend this number to thirty three teachers, enabling the books packs to find their way into 90 schools ranging from decile 1 to decile 10!

The teachers with a sample of the Puffin Pack!

From Pene:

What we have found through this exercise is that we are growing our relationship with the schools and are finding that more children are coming in-store with their parents.

What we are also finding is that our Children’s book sales have increased by over 100% since June with more schools coming in and finding out what we are doing.

This is something that the store is committed and we have added our own funds to the Puffin Grant in order to put these packs together.  Seeing the children bringing the completed forms back in and trying to decide what they are going to take from the prize box is a joy to behold.

Thank you again Penguin Random House for having these grants.