A number of students have volunteered to be part of the Royal Society Book Awards which involves reading the shortlisted 6 books, all based around science. Our students completed a review sheet and a voting form after completing each book.

As part of the introduction day our Senior Science Technician, John Dilger showed us some ‘whoosh, bang’ experiments. He did a couple of Whoosh Bottle experiments, the first using propan-1-ol & propan-2-ol, so we could observe and blue and yellow flames ‘dancing’ in the bottle. 

The second experiment showed how only a small amount of fuel is required to propel various types of plastic bottle across the science lab.

Our favourite experiment was mixing methane with soap bubbles and igniting floating bubbles.

It certainly gave the students a thirst for learning more about science.

Our students then spent a few weeks reading and judging the 6 shortlisted books and on 15th of  December we had a morning at City Library in Bradford where each student made a short presentation on their favourite book.

We then voted for the book title that we wanted to put forward as the school vote.Competition was fierce and our students gave impassioned speeches supporting their book.

Eventually a decision was made via a secret ballot and we have put forward ‘If the World Were 100 People’, an extremely interesting book showing world statistics for hair, eye and skin colour, languages spoken, levels of literacy and access to basic power, some information which we found quite startling.

We are now waiting for the winner to be announced in the Spring and are hoping to attend the awards ceremony in the Summer.

In November a number of the First Story students took part in the Chapel FM Literature on Air  programme.

Chapel FM is a radio station and Community Centre based in Seacroft, Leeds, they produce a literature festival every year where a wide range of writers, spoken artists, poets and authors are invited to take part and read their work on air.

Our First Story Ambassadors read from their published work in our recent anthology, ‘Down To Earth, Lost in the Stars’ which was produced last year with the YA author Dan Ingram Brown.

The First Story students who have joined the workshops this year read out recent work which has been written with our new writer in residence, Dr Sairish Hussain, a published author and lecturer at Huddersfield University. Their work will appear in our forthcoming anthology – we have no decision on the title at present.

We were accompanied by Claire Sharples from First Story who spoke about the aims and ambitions of First Story.

Peter Spafford from Chapel FM interviewed the students and they spoke about their love of creative writing and the thought processes behind their work. It was really interesting to see how a radio show is made.