Our Shelves

As my Head Teacher called them today, these are our "shelves," our improvised library.

The government here funded two new classroom blocks at my school, but has locked them until furniture can be brought. After weeks of being told that there will be library space soon, the classrooms will be commissioned soon... I decided to get creative. I may not have library space for quite a while, but with these book boxes I will be making these books available to students for an hour after school every day!

I'm so grateful that our school already had all of these books, but they have—until now—been kept in storage in the office, inaccessible to students. The other teachers want our school to develop a reading culture, but they (understandably) give all of their effort to teaching. I'm so happy to be here and be able to give my time to organizing our school's resources!

Peace Corps gave each of us a nifty little book about building a school library from scratch, and it's been useful! So far I have one fancy registry book, which is called our "accession record," and lists all of the books I've organized in no specific order. The important part of this is that it gives each book a number, which I have also written in sharpie (and circled, to make it easier for little ones to find) on the first page of each book. 

Even though our library doesn't yet have a lending system, I want to get the kids used to "checking-out" a book. So, when they come into the classroom for "book box time," there's a little notebook in which they'll write the book number and their name. This will also make it easier for me to see how many children we have using our library each day!

We have a fair quantity of books (this picture is only the ones I've organized so far) but most are set in the Western world. Of course, we all know how important it is that some books are windows while others are mirrors—meaning the students can see themselves in them.

So, if you happen to see any books set in Africa (East Africa, in particular) they'd be greatly appreciated over here! And if you can't send it along yourself, that's totally fine, just get it to my parents and they'd be happy to stick it in a care package!

Already, the students are incredibly excited to see books, and can't believe they were at our school the whole time. Library time starts on Monday, I'll let you all know how it goes!