Our Library helps teachers to promote a love of reading amongst the children in their classes.
Our librarians help pre-school and primary school teachers to select appropriate books, manage classroom libraries and, most importantly, understand how to inspire reading for pleasure. Large regular loans, for one to three months at a time, ensure that teachers have a fresh, exciting variety that caters for the reading levels and interests of everyone in their class.
Book boxes are accompanied by a log file that assists teachers or class monitors to sub-loan books so that children can read at home.
As well as hosting on-demand workshops on curating a valuable school library collection or on book care, we present regular seminars that add value to our book loans:
- Reading aloud daily, and how to follow read aloud sessions with discussion to develop language and thinking skills;
- Encouraging children to read independently every day, and how to value and observe children’s reading choices in order to build their reading skills.
In 2016 and 2017 our librarians began working on a three year programme with Aspiranza Primary and Willow Park Primary schools to ensure that every class in these two schools has a classroom library consisting of a shelving unit (see the picture below) and at least 75 donated books, and that teachers are conversant with the benefits of reading aloud. Our librarians also began facilitating children’s book clubs at our library so that they remain directly engaged with children, and continue to retain children’s perspectives on reading.
We believe that all children deserve to have access to the very best books; our exemplary book collection of over 25,000 individual titles in English, isiXhosa and Afrikaans, is additional to multi-use toy sets and literacy games. The collection has been built over a period of many years through donations from First National Battery, Rotary Bedfordview SA, Rotary Lymm UK and Exclusive Books.
