Children at the City of London’s only state primary school will be getting new story books thanks to a successful fundraising initiative started by Portsoken Councillor Jason Pritchard.
Surpassing his fundraising target means Cllr Pritchard has now raised enough money to provide over 1,000 free books for children at the school – or the equivalent of four books for every child at the school.
Cllr Pritchard started the campaign because of the profound impact that reading at an early age had on his own life.
Writing on his online donation page, Cllr Pritchard said: “I started this campaign because as a parent, I wanted to support the school’s aims of promoting reading and in particular reading for pleasure.
“Reading books aloud to children stimulates their imagination and expands their understanding of the world. One of the things we hope to do is to bring greater diversity to the books at the school and to make them more specific to the demographic of the school. The school currently has 22 different nationalities.”
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The children at the Aldgate school come from all sorts of different homes and language backgrounds and the school aims to help each one of them achieve exceptional results by the time they leave the school. Reading for pleasure is a particular focus for the children through the use of storybooks.
As well as helping to develop social skills it can also teach the children thinking skills whereby they learn to question what they are learning, justify it and change their minds if they so wish. Building a broader general knowledge and vocabulary will help them to participate more fully with conversations.
Cllr Pritchard said: ”This campaign would not have been anywhere near as successful without the incredible generosity and kindness of so many people, especially during a time as difficult as the one we are in.
“I would like to say a big thank you for all the individual donations and also to the City of London Livery Companies who through their generous charitable grants, donations and individual members have played a big part in helping this appeal surpass its goal so quickly.”
In addition to receiving financial donations the school also received 30 books that were donated to Councillor Pritchard to support the campaign. These were kindly donated to the school by the Booksellers Association who are based in Bell Yard.
Although the fundraising target has been reached, donations can still be made – and every donation helps.
Donations can be made by contacting Lizzie Webb at the Aldgate School [email protected]
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