Promoting Small Small Bookshop at School

After meeting the staff at Small Small Bookshop and attending the events, we decided to make a Powerpoint presentation to share with the school. Then we used an online survey to find out what the students had learned from our presentation. We hope that after today our classmates can visit the bookstore when they have some free time.

Promoting the Bookstore within the Community

After we finished collating the data from our first survey, we discovered that a large amount of people in the local area have never heard of the Small Small Bookshop. Because of this, we decided that we should introduce the local community to the bookstore. We all took the information about the bookstore and made it into posters and leaflets to hand out. We walked out into the busy areas of our community with our posters, sandwich boards and leaflets to introduce Small Small to everyone. We hope that after listening to us, everyone will try to visit and fall in love with the bookstore too!

Small Small Bookshop's Vietnamese Singing Night

The 2012 Taipei Poetry Festival's "Beautiful Vietnamese Poems" event was held at the Small Small Bookshop. We spent the evening looking through brochures about Vietnamese poetry and listening to the host and three poets share their thoughts. At the event, we learned about Taiwan's different kinds of literature and were able to feel how Vietnamese people use poetry to express different emotions.

Small Small Bookshop's Comics to Save the World

This time we spent our weekend attending an event called "Social Cartoonists: Citizens Soapbox". These cartoonists all have one thing in common, that is that they use social issues as the theme for their comics and cartoons. During the activity, each of the cartoonists introduced their work and their favorite comics. These social issues really touched us deeply, so we are now more able to appreciate the skill of the cartoonists.

"Hope for Reading" Video

After seeing Small Small Bookshop's promotion of reading in the community, it made us think once again about the importance of reading. Our teacher showed us a video during naptime made by a magazine called "Hope for Reading". The video is about a mobile library that drives around Taiwan's countryside, even to the remote islands to encourage children to read. This made us realize how lucky we are to have the resources that we have. We need to use these resources wisely and help others more. Everyone discussed vigorously, we all wanted to share this video with all of the students and teachers in the school then start a second hand book collection drive! Not only will this help books find new owners, but we can also put the money collected from selling books to good use.

What Influences Reading Habits?

Children growing up in the countryside cherish books so much, how can city children influence reading habits? We wrote down all the things that we thought affect reading on post-it notes and arranged them in a mind map, then listed them in order of most influence.

Next, each team used an Internet tool – Seeing Reason – to make a web of how these things come together by drawing lines between them. Finally, we used Visual Ranking to put the reading habits in order. After it was finished, everyone was able to observe the results.

Moodle Platform

During this time, the Cyberfair team has been out on assignment often. Because of this, our teacher setup a Moodle online learning platform for us. This way we could work on the project anywhere at any time of the day. Having this platform was really convenient for us. Even at home, we were able to complete assignments and have discussions with other team members!

Big Brother/Sister Storytelling Activity

In order to improve reading habits at school, we wanted to arrange a big brother/sister storytelling activity. We could use this activity to find an interesting way to introduce the younger students to the world of books. Before we organized the event, we designed an activity sign-up card to see how many students would be interested. After looking at the numbers, we discovered that even more students than we imagined signed up and we had to find an extra room!

Parental Reading Habits

When we were discussing things that influence reading habits, we learned that family reading habits was an important factor. So we designed a questionnaire for parents to fill in to ask about their normal reading habits. In order to get the most honest results, we made the questionnaires anonymous.

Interview with a Publisher

After we interviewed the staff at the bookstore, on Novermber 23rd we also talked to a publisher that has a lot of ties with the bookstore – Mr. Yu. After talking with Mr. Yu, we learned a lot about his passion and feelings towards the bookstore, and we also got to learn about all the difficult things publishers have to do.

Book Release Party

After the interview, we were able to attend a book release party. At the party, the publisher was releasing a new book and we got to hear all about it. Although there wasn't many people there this time, and the books released were all different genres, there was still a lot of interaction and networking between the publishers and attendees!

Small Small Life Publication

Small Small Bookshop has another extension called "Small Small Life Society". Their main priority is to promote literary activities within the community. On November 24th, we were honored to attend the release of the publication of the 7th edition of a literary magazine called "Small Small Life". From listening to the talks by those involved, we were able to understand the effort involved in publishing a magazine like this. It also made us really admire all of those involved

Source : Yu-Tsai Bookworms