The welcoming library contains a wide range of up-to-date resources to support the learning and teaching needs of pupils and staff as well as their reading interests, encouraging students to become independent life-long learners.

Staff

Librarian: Mrs Page

Library Assistant: Mrs Duncan

Opening Hours

8:30 am – 4:15 pm

The library is open throughout intervals and lunchtime.

Resources

The stock of about 8,000 items includes a wide selection of fiction to attract pupils of all ages and abilities. The non-fiction section contains items to help with homework and research, as well as plenty of books for general interest on a wide number of subjects. To help with revision, the library stocks past papers and revision guides covering all school subjects, as well as books containing guidance on how to study well. Local newspapers can be found here, as well as magazines on a range of topics. The Careers section is kept up to date with information to show pupils a huge collection of options open to them. A number of computers with Internet access are also available for pupil use.

Borrowing

S1 – S3 pupils may borrow 2 items for up to 4 weeks.

S4 – S6 pupils may borrow 6 items for up to 4 weeks.

There are no fines for overdue(过期的) items but failure to return an item will result in a request for payment for a replacement.

Pupils are reminded about overdue items via their teacher on a weekly basis. After 3 reminders a letter will be sent home and a second letter will be sent home after a further 4 weeks.

Please do not hesitate to contact Mrs Page if you wish to discuss any matters arising from pupil use of the library.

Father's Day is celebrated today in 75 countries around the world. In my personal world, it's a day I like to think of my father's father.

I learned a lot in my later life from my dad. But I learned something else, as a kid not even yet in school, from my grandfather. I learned to be curious. Little things fathers and grandfathers do can change the life of a child forever. In my case, this change came from necessity: My mom needed someone to look after little Allen, barely 4 years old, during the school day. My grandmother volunteered, and my grandfather came up with a way I could be watched while he worked in his clockmaker's shop.

He seated me on a chair every day while I was there, right in front of his big workbench. He told me stories. He had a great sense of humor and a funny way of making a "buh-buh-buh" sound when he sensed my attention was weakening, and he encouraged me to ask questions about anything he was doing.

Naturally, I was usually asking questions about clocks--what made the hands move, what the pendulum(钟摆) did, why you had to stop winding just before the weight hit the stop. Sometimes I just asked about which shiny parts went where.

Most of all, he showed me how clocks worked. He treated me as if I were a sort of small grown-up. He never talked down to me, never told me I was "too young to understand".

And so my grandfather granted me two things: A love of clocks, and an everlasting curiosity.

As a journalist, I turned that fascination into explanations of why computers and software do what they do——and, perhaps even more importantly, why they fail at that task. I haven't been afraid of opening up the innards and looking for what is wrong with the computer.

October 15th is the Global Handwashing Day. Activities are planned in more than 20 countries to get millions of people in the developing world to wash their hands with soap. For example, donators will give 150,000 bars of soap to schools in Ethiopia.

Experts say people around the world wash their hands every day, but very few use soap at so-called important moments. These include after using the toilet, after cleaning a baby and before touching food.

Global Handwashing Day is the idea of the Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap. Partners include the United Nations Children’s Fund, American government agencies, the World Bank and soap makers Unlever and Procter and Gamble. The organizers say all soaps are equally effective at removing disease-causing bacterium. They say the correct way to wash is to wet your hands with a small amount of water and cover them with soap. Rub (揉搓) it into all areas, including under the fingernails. Rub for at least twenty seconds. Then rinse well under running water. Finally, dry your hands with a clean cloth or wave them in the air.

The Partnership for Handwashing says soap is important because it increases the time that people spend in washing hands. Soap also helps to break up the dirt that holds most of the bacterium. And it usually leaves a pleasant smell. The Partnership for Handwashing also says washing with soap before eating or after using the toilet could save more lives than any vaccine(疫苗) or medicine. Hand washing could also prevent the spread of other diseases. When people get bacterium on their hands, they can infect (感染) themselves by touching their eyes, noses or mouths. Then they can infect others.

People say that text messages and e-mails lack emotion compared to phone or face-to-face conversations. But one thing seems to improve it – the emoticon(表情符).

These little symbols – whether it’s a wink(眨眼); -), a smiley : -) or a sad face :-( - always add a little something to whatever you are sending out, making it more expressive than cold words on a screen.

To be sure, emoticons have changed the way that we communicate with each other. But there is more: a new study found that they are even changing how our brains work – we now react to emoticons in the same way as we would to real human faces, reported Live Science.

It’s actually amazing when you start to think about it: what an emoticon consists of is simply three punctuation marks(标点符号) – on their own, they carry no meaning as a pair of eyes, a nose or a mouth, but after they were first put together as symbols for faces in 1982, they began to appear more and more in our written materials.

Owen Churches, a scientist at Flinders University in Australia, wanted to find out what people see in emoticons that make them so popular. So he showed 20 participants images of real faces, a smiley emoticon and a series of meaningless characters while their brain activities were monitored.

Previous studies have already shown that our brains process human faces differently than they do other objects – they analyze the position of the mouth relative to the nose and the eyes to “read” for emotions. As a result, certain parts of our brain, such as the occipital-temporal cortex, are activated(激活).

When Churches compared participants’ brain activities, he was surprised to find that the brain areas that were activated when people looked at smiley emoticons were the same as when they were shown pictures of real faces.

According to Churches, this is a good example of how culture is shaping our brains. “Emoticons are a new form of language that we’re producing,” Churches told ABC Science. “Before 1982 there would be no reason that ‘:-)’ would activate face-sensitive areas of the cortex, but now it does because we’ve learnt that this represents a face.”

Next time you chat with your friends online, try to use emoticons where they are needed. It’ll be almost like you’re smiling or winking at them yourself.

For a bird, to fly hundreds or thousands of miles each spring and fall is a difficult and dangerous journey, one that not all birds can survive.     16     There is more than one single reason for different birds to migrate(迁徙), but it all comes down to survival.

Birds are migrating for a meal.

For all birds, one of the main driving forces behind migration is food. If all birds were to stay in the same places year-round, food there would become not enough.     17     But as the food supplies decrease in the fall, they return to the southern areas.

    18    

Over millions of years, birds have developed different migration patterns, times and destinations. This helps birds take advantage of a wide variety of suitable conditions to raise their young, which increases the survival chances of the young birds.

Birds are migrating because of climate changes.

Changes in climate can affect migration. Many birds leave the Arctic for example, when temperatures begin to fall. They need warmer habitats. Similarly, the hottest regions can be an unpleasant environment for raising young birds.     19    

Birds are migrating because of predators.

Habitats that have rich food sources also attract a greater number of predators who may kill birds.     20     Many birds even migrate to specialized habitats that are nearly inaccessible to predators, such as coastal cliffs or rocky offshore islands.