One of the primary objectives of our school library is to make it easier for students to develop a love of reading. Reading is a skill that will be of use throughout their lives, so we take this rather seriously!
It is most often that a love of reading grows when youth have discovered a series of chapter books that really interests them. We have shelved our series chapter books by series, to make it much easier for our students to find the next book in the series they are reading.
We have ranked all of our chapter books by a system of five reading ability levels, to reduce the delay between the book they have just finished and the next book they will read.
Our junior fiction and non-fiction has been combined into one collection where all of the books are catagorised by themes; Culture, Technology, Animals, Let’s Pretend, Our World, Body and Mind.
This has made it easier for our junior students to locate books about topics they are interested in without narrowing their selection to only non-fiction or fiction. It means that our students are reading a wider range of materials, making the move to chapter books faster.
For our reluctant readers we have collections of TV/Movies based books, Graphic Novels/Comics, Lego, and Star Wars at a range of different reading ability levels.
Our Thames & New Zealand collection contains some unique and hard-to-find resources to enhance our student’s knowledge and understanding about their local community and how it came about.
For our Year 7 & 8 students only, we have a range of interest-based magazines and sophisticated picture books (like a picture book but with themes for young teens) only they can issue.
We have a range of programmes that are increasingly student led by our Caretakers of the Library. These students are Years 7 & 8, and their role is to run library programmes such as Book Day/Week, Craft/Gift making sessions, and activities based on holidays for any students interested in participating.
Year 6 students are able to volunteer for our Student Librarian programme which focuses on the day-to-day running of the library such as opening the library at break times for book issues and returns, shelving, and assisting other students in the library.
Our library is a small building but we have extended our library space by creating a library garden for students and a whole class at-a-time to read in.
As an environmentally friendly school, our garden has bench seats made from recycled materials. For example, the old cricket practice cage poles are now the poles supporting our bench seats, and timber from old wooden bench seats have been reused to make our library garden benches. Our plants have all been donated by various people in the community that understood our vision and wanted to be a part of it.
At the end of 2019, our school upgraded to management software that better met the needs of our school. The library now uses Edge Library Manager and students have access to the library catalogue from home/out and about and within their classrooms. To access our catalogue, each student requires a username and password that is initially set up by the student’s parent.
For more information about this set-up process, please contact [email protected] If you have a username and password already set up, you can use the following link to access the catalogue: School Library Catalogue
In order to meet the requirements of our objective to support teaching staff and classes with resources that support the curriculum, we utilise the loan services of The National Library of New Zealand. These loans supplement our Senior Non-Fiction and other collections with up-to-date and curriculum relevant books that ensure our students have the resources they need.