New school library

Over the past few weeks, we've made quite a bit of progress with redeveloping our school library. It currently consists of three shabby looking shelves in a corridor and does absolutely nothing to promote reading in the school.

      

Our present 'library'

We're in the process of moving it to a much larger space and having a major cull of the books. The new site is still a bit of a thoroughfare in the school, but with a few screens and some nifty furniture movement, we're going to turn it to a space that's a lot more welcoming.

We were lucky enough to be given a large grant from the Norwich Town Close Estate Charity which has helped us buy a lot of new furniture.

           

Some of the new furniture

We were unsuccessful with a bid to the Foyle Foundation (probably due to our Pupil Premium figures being too low), but we then received some money from The Adnams Charity which was a huge help when deciding what to buy to restock the shelves. There has been no significant investment in books at the school for the best part of 15 years so there are massive, massive gaps on the shelves.

 Some of our current library books: A 50-year-old copy of Stig of the Dump that claims 'Pleasure in Reading' and a book about the Industrial Revolution that appears to have been published during the Industrial Revolution

The first thing we did was send round a class wishlist to each class so that the children could have as much input as possible over what we bought. Classes spent time discussing what genres and authors they enjoyed and then completed the lists. We also asked for advice about graphic novels from the Reading for Pleasure in Schools group on Facebook and looked at shortlists for book awards, etc. Eventually a whole school list was created. The focus this year has been entirely on fiction and poetry, with the focus from September being on non-fiction. There just isn't enough money or time to do it all at once.

 

Class wishlist

Getting the most value for our money was absolutely key, so several hours were spent trawling through websites, with Amazon, The Book People and Peters being the main focus. We then put the orders together and waited for our shiny new books to arrive. Most of them were delivered over half-term although a few are still outstanding. We purchased Junior Librarian to help with stock and will be getting the support of Norfolk SLS when we catalogue the books. The current plan is to have a grand launch just before the Easter holidays.

It's taken longer than I anticipated. The children are getting excited about their new library but also rather impatient. They've seen the furniture around the school for a few weeks and want books on shelves!

We've now got to think about how can ensure it functions as a library and doesn't just become another set of disorganised bookshelves. Unfortunately, the money isn't available to employ anybody and moving staff from classes will obviously have a knock-on effect. Training up Year 5/6 librarians will certainly help, but they're going to need guidance and support. It's by no means perfect, but it's a lot more positive than it was a year or so ago.

School Reading Council

After half-term we are going to be officially launching our School Reading Council. Full details are currently a bit sketchy, but the overall aim is to give the pupils much more ownership over how we promote reading in school. Findings from the Literacy Trust's 2008 report, Young People's Self-Perception As Readers, emphasise the need to 'use systems of peer-to-peer recommendation, involving pupils in their school's reading culture and championing reading to other pupils' and a 2011 literacy survey reports that 'young people who are encouraged to read by their friends a lot are nearly twice as likely to enjoy reading and nearly three times more likely to say that they think reading is "cool" than those who are not.'

So far, we've chosen two children to represent each class, one who is already an avid reader and one who isn't (yet). Hopefully being on the council will remedy that! They are all allowed to wear a 'Book Champion' badge around school, which will give the position some real status, and will be attending meetings every couple of weeks, as well as feeding back to their class regularly.

When we had our inaugural meeting last week, they were absolutely full of ideas and suggestions about how to get the other pupils, the staff and their parents reading more. They're planning to be in charge of organising and delivering book boxes to the playground at lunchtime so that pupils can read outside if they wish. They talked about developing the book area in each classroom and getting each class to focus on a Class Author every half-term, as well as having more say in selecting the books we borrow from our local school library service. There were also suggestions to roll out the Mystery Book idea across the whole school.

They council members were desperate to be given a reading display board in a prominent area in the school, over which they would have complete control. One of their first ideas for a display was to go and photograph staff reading their favourite books and then expand on our #mymumreads and #mydadreads initiatives by launching a #myvillagereads campaign. Hopefully that will involve more than wandering around the village and harassing the local butcher into holding up a copy of his daily newspaper.

A couple of them were also extremely keen to be 'reading experts' and share their book recommendations with children who are struggling to find anything they want to read, which could be very successful if introduced sensitively.

One of the areas I'd love to give them a real say in is organising future author visits. At the next meeting I'm planning to give them a shortlist of 3/4 authors and then ask them to go off and do some research into who they think would be popular for a whole school visit. I will also leave it up to them to publicise the visit, ensure that each class has access to some relevant books, etc. They were also very interested to find out if they were allowed any sort of budget to spend on certificates and prizes for reading and new books, comics and magazines.

The fact that they were so full of enthusiasm has given me confidence that the idea can be sustained throughout the year, even if some of the council members change. In my experience, a buzz about reading created by children has more impact than a buzz about reading created by adults and, to quote from the Literacy Trust's 2008 report, 'we can use the enthusiasm of the self-defined readers to encourage other readers to widen their choice of reading materials in creative and innovative ways.'

I'm looking forward to seeing how the School Reading Council develops over the coming months and will update this post at some point with a progress report. On a completely separate subject, this afternoon my youngest daughter (age 4) went upstairs and took all the books off her bookshelves. She then hid them under her bed and filled the shelves with her collection of princess tiaras. Her argument was that 'They look nicer!'. I think she's going to be quite a tough nut to crack with this whole reading business...