Kirkcowan and Wigtown Primary Schools at the Open Book

‘The Open Book’

Kirkcowan and Wigtown Partnership Enterprise Project

Project outline

Wigtown Festival Company has recently set up its own bookshop called ‘The Open Book’ for authors to run for short periods of time, whilst benefiting from using it as a creative writing retreat. We are fortunate to have been offered the fantastic opportunity of joining in with this venture and running their book shop for 10 days!

The benefits to the children will be that the enterprise project will provide the opportunity to apply their Literacy and Numeracy skills in this real life context.  Also, that as the real authors are doing, they will be able to take their writing to this creative location and gain inspiration from it. Each primary class from the two schools will take ownership of the bookshop for one day.

From an enterprise point of view, we will be supporting this local community organisation, knowing that any books we sell provide profits for the Festival and puts money back into the community. We have benefitted greatly from the Wigtown Festival Company and the special offers that they provide for our children, so it is nice for the children to learn that support within the community works both ways.

We also hope to support our local authors through running the bookshop and have permission to promote and sell on behalf of Shalla Gray, Jayne Baldwin and Pauline James.

Organisation

As the bookshop is open from 9.30-4.30 Monday - Saturday, we will need support from friends and families to run the sessions that are out-with school hours, but again this is a fantastic opportunity for children to run the bookshop independently! We hope you will agree this is worthwhile supporting and consider indicating on the table over the page if you could help with an afterschool or weekend slot.  Should you wish to pop in and browse whilst your child is ‘working’, this is also shown on the table.

I have broken the day into 2 hour or 1.5 hour slots, to make it more manageable for the children, however if any parents would like to take 2 slots together, that would be fine.

I hope you agree this is an exciting opportunity for our children and a fantastic way in which to support Scottish National Book Week!