Telling Tales: The Loreto Literary Festival 2024
A huge shout-out to our main Sponsor, UNESCO – Dublin City of Literature. Their care and investment in literature and literacy aimed at our young people is extraordinary and we are so grateful for their support which made so much more possible in for us in 2024.
Huge thanks also to all the participating schools who made it so much fun to be there – your students are a credit to you!
Special thanks to all our facilitators too for bringing the joy, and creating such a warm, friendly, collaborative vibe in all their workshops. Massive bualadh bos to Laureate na nÓg, Patricia Forde, broadcaster and book club supremo, Rick O’Shea, best-selling author and artist Oisín McGann, storyteller extraordinaire, Niall de Búrca, horror writer and D&D campaign legend, Graham Tugwell, and award-winning author, Loreto on the Green Writer-in-Residence and amazing co-founder of the festival, Dave Rudden
We would also like to acknowledge our two other wonderful sponsors for this event whose contributions and support we value enormously – Renaissance Learning and Alan Hanna’s Bookshop.
A flavour of Telling Tales 2024. What a day it was!
Telling Tales: The Loreto Literary Festival 2023
We were so excited to launch our very first literary festival; Telling Tales. This aims to be a celebration of all things that orbit the term ‘literary’ – writing, performing, illustrating and broadcasting – and took place in the gorgeous arena that is the TCD Exam Hall in October. Designed to ease First Year students into secondary curricula, we were delighted to welcome 15 different schools to the event.
Thanks to all our facilitators too for bringing the joy, and creating such a warm, friendly, collaborative vibe in all their workshops. Creating the buzz at our inaugural Telling Tales were broadcaster and book club supremo, Rick O’Shea, best-selling author and artist Oisín McGann, Performance Poet, Erin Fornoff, horror writer and D&D campaign legend, Graham Tugwell, best-selling YA novelist Cat Doyle.
We were also able to treat ourselves to time spent with our host for the day, Loreto on the Green Writer-in-Residence, co-founder of the festival and award-winning author, Dave Rudden.
Big shout out to Trinity College Dublin also, for making us feel so welcome – we can’t wait to be back!
The Wellread National Award is an initiative designed and organised by the Professional Development Service for Teachers (PDST). It aims to create a heightened awareness about the importance of creating a culture of reading for young people as part of their personal and academic development. It seeks to involve all relevant stakeholders who impact on student learning including students, teachers, ancillary staff, parents, Boards of Management and the wider Community.
We are fortunate that literacy development has been deeply embedded in the school community for a number of years now and a high number of students engage in intensive reading however, there is always room for improvement and with this in mind we registered for the Wellread Award 2018/2019. A Wellread Committee was established, a strategy was formulated and a large number of initiatives was undertaken throughout the school year. We organised creative writing competitions, book clubs, reading for fun classes, visiting authors, creative writing classes for 5th years, poetry evening for staff, dress up as a character from a book and many more events. New reading corners with arm chairs and bean bags were set up in the Library and Computer Room and have become really popular with the students. A reading area was also set up in the Staff Room with book shelves which are stocked by staff and Library donations. We put together our Portfolio showing evidence of all our undertakings and submitted it on 8th May. To our delight, on 24th May we received a letter advising us that we have been successful in becoming a Wellread School 2019 – 2022..
Having fun in the Library
