Excellence Academy – Key Stage 3 – Book Club

Excellence Academy – Key Stage 3 – Book Club

The Year 7 Excellence Academy have recently completed their first book review for the Book Club, ‘The Secret Code Menace’ by Pamela Cosman.

This thoughtful and provocative fiction revolves around the science of secret codes and error correction. Sara, Daniel and Jared have devised their own simple code to communicate with each other in class at school.  But when a written, coded message is amended en-route to Sara and she gets into trouble, they start to explore how they could protect their code from tampering by somebody. This all remains a private hobby, until one day, on a school trip to a bank, the class is caught up in an attempted bank robbery. Suddenly Sara, Daniel and Jared’s playing with codes – and with methods of error correction – has an urgent reality.

Over hot chocolate and biscuits, the club compared notes on what they thought of the book. Avneet Singh said that ‘The codes kept you guessing all the way through the book, you really didn’t know what was around the corner.’ However, others thought the characters were one dimensional.

The next book the club have chosen to read is Jo Macauley’s ‘Secrets and Spies, Inferno’. This is set in 1666, and follows the adventures of Beth Johnson, a talented actress and spy. Beth hears about a plot to kill King Charles II, and the book centres around Beth’s mission to save the King.