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Windley is a full primary decile 1 school in Porirua East Wellington.
The Windley School library is privotal to creating readers and developing literacy.
The library is integral to the classroom reading programme, and the collection is targeted
to meet diverse reading needs and interests.
The library welcomes all of the school community and actively promotes preschool literacy.
Windley School teachers are readers and actively promote books and reading.
Windley school students visit the local Cannons Creek public library during
school time and after school
and often encourage their parents and other family to use the library with them.
The collaboration between school and
public library
is building a community of readers.
I guess when we had the library built we were getting a much larger space
so it's almost in two sections. So we've got the collection in one place and then a
big space where we had this vision where
it was a place where children could just relax and enjoy books and to read together or
by themselves
so we've got a selection of seating and cushions
and it opens out to a lovely deck so in summer
it creates a nice space at lunchtime and after school for children to come and relax and enjoy books.
I think art of the country's diplomats we're going tfirst and foremost we're looking at the library as being
an integral part
of the reading programme
rather than just a seperate standalone place where you go to just change books
and so forth.
The way that I do it is first of all is setting those expectations up
early a year about
the purpose of reading um.. in all its forms
and what happens at that time.
On the first day I brought in all the reading I'd had in the holidays and just had a pile sitting next to me
and just said this is what I read in the holidays and went through.
I mean the kids were just you know um
really excited about the fact
that that amount of reading can be done
and so forth. And I had boys from then who took books away and sat there and read about
Tana Umanga and so forth.
Uh...and then secondly I guess the other
main area is the teaching reading time, which
I think is hugely important and throughout the age range. I mean
every opportunity you're saying to the children in the class
about the enjoyment of reading and so forth
and modeling and showing that to the children. Some days it will be reading the
newspaper. Some days it may be reading a magazine within the class, or
like the Guiness Book of World Records and Ripleys and Graphic Novels and so you can read a variety of them
and also ensuring that you're reading a book that, you know a novel
or something that's important to shift their mind into
reading books that are more substantial in terms of having to read
over a number of days and weeks.
I talked to, we've got a really good relationship with the local library up at Cannons Creek and Bee the librarian there,
I talk with her and she
gives me lots of tips on
very popular series or books that I might not know about and so we go with that as well.
And when I began working here I thought a
really good way to build a customer base would be to ring my old friend
and say
why don't you bring a class up
and we started doing that just Vanessa and I
and it's sort of spread right through the junior and middle
syndicate so that
now I think we've got nine classes
come up and do...lots of things going on in the background...
Well I guess one of the main things is that the children are aware that it's here
and that they come in
and they get involved as well in the holiday programmes
that Bee sets up.
And uh
they come in and do homework
quite large groups of them now. Some of them
bring their parents in and use the resources that are here to work interactively
with their parents as well which is just
wonderful.
The inquiry for one of the areas of the school at the moment is around spiders
so
we've got a huge display with some spiders around and uh
links to
within, on our intranet
links to
places on the internet that they can find information around spiders
as well
we've got, we use the National Library so we use National Library books to
boost our collection because, you know obviously it's very difficult to have
you know enough books on a particular topic when you have four or five classes
studying that.
Roald Dahl, we had a focus on Roald Dahl and we had, alot of teachers were reading
Roald Dahl when they were going into the library
we had a lot of Roald Dahl books out
made links again to
websites and information
and there were groups of children that um
gathered information about Roald Dahl and where, you know
and a bit of history around Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and classes voted for their favourite
Roald Dahl book
so they had Roald Dahl work up at their local library, Roald Dahl work in our library
Roald Dahl work in the classroom
and, and then we had, it ended up in this huge assembly where Bee and Donny from the library came and joined
us as well
and it was all around Roald Dahl stories.
And we've done that before with Hairy Maclary when it was his birthday and
and that was nice because Lynley Dodd
visited the local shopping mall and the book shop there
and we took alot of the work down for her, and we'd made a big cake,
not a real cake, but a big cake
and the candles were lists of
the favourite stories
books that the children had
and that was nice because then she wrote to the school and the classes and
thanked them and talked about it
so we've got in pride of place the letter from Lynley Dodd.