Love your school library
Does your school library encourage children to develop a lifelong love of books and reading or is it a dusty store of dated books no-one wants to read?
We've collated this short check-list to help you encourage children into your school library:
Develop a buying team – select children from each class to support book selection. Use them to select books and canvas opinion – this creates a buzz when the books arrive as the children are excited to see the books they've chosen.
Be a book pusher! Encourage children to add post it notes (see our post-it notes blog) to books with mini reviews. You could make a feature display of these like many book shops do now.
Ask bookshops for promotional book posters, they get lots and will often pass them onto schools when they are finished with them. If you don't ask you don't get!
Have an extreme reading competition and get the staff to join in too. The winning entries could be made into reading champion posters to be displayed in school.
Have a simple display of what each class is reading that can be kept up to date and changed easily. Create collections that support the texts and topics being studied in each year group and rotate these as the topics change.
Have a cull, be honest, get rid of books that are tatty or dated. You can then replace them even if slowly with better quality books. You could run a sponsored read to raise money.
During guided reading you could send an additional adult to the library with a group of children to teach them both library skills and how to select books.
Make sure that your library includes a variety of texts. Don't forget to include comics, magazines and newspapers. First news is a must for your library and you might also want to explore subscribing to The Phoenix for a really diverse weekly comic.
Have a library champion. This could be a member of staff charged with running the library or could be a parent volunteer or school governor. What you need is someone who is passionate about books and reading and who has time to make the library the heart and soul of the school.
Don't forget the technology. Libraries are about information as well as reading. Make sure children are able to access information through computers and tablets as well as from books.
Make it comfortable. We all like to read in different places so provide a variety of seating and open and closed spaces.
These are just a few ideas to get you started. We'd love to hear how else you've made sure that your school library promotes a love of reading.