Introducing our Reading Wonderland

Last week we opened our new library space and our students got VERY excited!  Here's proof:

A neat feature is the little creatures, hidden doors and adorable bugs that can be found in the room if you look hard enough.  Spotting these was the reason for a lot of the extra noise!  Here's a few of them...

History

For a long time I lamented over the lack of space in our library.  Considering we have 750-800+ students, our 89m2 library was often jam packed.  "It's like a club" was a teacher's comment after venturing in one lunchtime.  

In January 2014, I made a proposal to the Board of Trustees to enclose the library courtyard area.  I was given the go ahead to get some quotes but my happiness was short-lived as incorrect concrete had been laid and therefore walls could not be erected on it.  The cost of digging up the old concrete and then laying new concrete made the project unaffordable.

For some reason this area wasn't very popular!

I considered taking over a bit of our adjoining resource room, but a giant air conditioning unit would have to have been moved.  In the end I looked at enclosing the courtyard with an outdoor screen, much like cafes often have, in order to weatherproof it and be able to lay carpet.  This revised proposal was accepted late last year and all systems were go!

Esther, our library assistant, suggested I put tiered seating in the room and then she found an apprentice builder who could do it for us.  I love the different dynamic this creates in the space.

My vision for the area was to have a theme so that students feel they are in a special spot, quite different from the rest of the library.  I ended up asking our very creative teacher aide, Jenna, to make a meadow/forest mural that went around every wall in the space.  Considering the walls are made of corrugated iron, glass, and wooden slats, I asked Jenna to go with quirky and whimsical art that incorporated the different surfaces, and then I showed her some art I liked that I'd saved in Pinterest.  I also asked for a blue sky ceiling where students could see different shapes in the clouds.  Because I like to be difficult!  And then I left Jenna to it because I knew that what she came up with would be way cooler than I could imagine.  And it was!

Naming the Room

I wanted the room to have its own identity so it needed to have its own name.  We held a competition last week to see what the students could come up with.  We had 379 entries; here are some of the key words that kept appearing: forest, garden, reading, nature, magic, enchanted, paradise, mystery, secret, fantasy, dreamland, wonderland, kingdom, peaceful, beautiful.  Aren't they lovely words to have associated with the library?  The winning entry was 'Reading Wonderland'.

The Opening Ceremony

My enthusiastic library advisory group, the Mighty Magical Moustache Girls, helped organise an official opening ceremony, which took place during morning tea on Tuesday.  I invited the staff involved with transforming the courtyard, our senior management and our Board of Trustees (although unfortunately, apart from our principal and DP, none of the Board could make it).  We also had some reporters from the Te Totara Times and we invited our book club, the Ferocious Bookworms, because the Moustache Girls felt we needed more of an audience!

We had a shared morning tea of the very sugary variety and then I thanked the Board of Trustees for their support and some of the Mighty Magical Moustache Girls thanked key staff and talked about our future plans for the room.  I announced the winner of the naming competition and then she cut the ribbon and declared the Reading Wonderland open.  Esther and I had blown up lots of balloons and put them in the room so everyone had a bit of fun with those.  It was short and sweet, which is how I like my ceremonies!  Here is the report from the Te Totara Times (also short and sweet!).

Communicating with the Community

Throughout the creation of the mural I posted photos to our library Facebook page.  These had positive responses, with many of our community knowing our artist Jenna, as she is also a parent of children in the school, and a teacher aide here.

I also shot the video of the children's reactions to the Reading Wonderland and shared this with our community on our school website and our school and library Facebook pages.  I don't think photographs would have done justice to the noise levels and extreme levels of excitement!

I invited parents to come in and view the Reading Wonderland and we saw some new faces, which was great. 

Plans for the Reading Wonderland

I am looking forward to the Reading Wonderland being a place where our classes are read to, where students can read with each other, and where we can also run some special activities.  At present it hosts the Mighty Magical Moustache Girls, the Ferocious Bookworms and the Ninja Unicorns in Uniforms (our creative writing group).  I have plans for a crochet group and we also want to do occasional craft activities and have reader's theatre sessions.  

I'm so happy to have such a great room.  It was definitely worth the time and effort involved with making it happen.  One of our Year 2 teachers told me that a reluctant reader in her class asked if the room would be open again at lunchtime.  Music to my ears!

Advocacy through Photojournalism

On Wednesday, I finally got to spend a book voucher a friend got me for my birthday.  Since my birthday was in July you can imagine what it was like for a librarian to have that sitting in her purse for months!  I just never made it to the independent book store the voucher was from.  Anyway, I am so pleased with my purchase.  I had a look at the non-fiction finalists for Goodreads' 2015 awards and then bought "Humans of New York: Stories" because I vaguely remembered seeing posts from "Humans of New York" (HONY) occasionally shared in my Facebook news feed.

It is just a beautiful book.  Obviously I am a bit late to HONY fandom, it has over 16 million likes on Facebook.  I have subsequently read up a lot on Brandon Stanton, listened to podcasts, watched YouTube clips...over-researched as per usual!  But I find the idea of what he does so fascinating.  He goes up to strangers in New York and asks to take their photo.  Then he interviews them and puts a caption or a paragraph, in their own words, alongside their photo on his website and Facebook page.  You get a little insight into the life of an "ordinary" New Yorker, it is captivating.

Being the obsessive librarian that I am, I immediately starting thinking about how this technique could be used in a library.  I have often heard people talk about "always carrying a camera" and "making sure you share the stories from your library" - this is a way to combine both these ideas.  It's a chance to advocate for your library through photojournalism.

This year I started a "Caught Reading" Facebook album that has evolved in a similar way to Brandon's work.  Initially it was just one photo a week of random children who were reading in the library at lunchtime.  Recently I started including a reference to the book titles that the students were reading.  The one I posted on Monday was one of the most popular this year, and was a result of me talking with my subjects a little longer than usual.

Aren't they cute?  Now that I've read Brandon's book I wish that I had been able to use a quote to make it more personal.  So that is my task for Monday - see if I can take a photo and find a good quote to go with it.  Brandon asks about people's saddest moments, happiest moments, who has influenced them the most...lovely, deep questions.  To get a library vibe I've been thinking about asking why they decided to come to the library, what they like about the library, what they are enjoying about the book they are reading, and what their favourite book is and why.  That way, I'll hopefully not only get a good quote to accompany the photo but also more insight into what students are reading and how they feel about the library.

By doing this I can also continue the advocacy that comes from posting to Facebook and hopefully build up my followers.  What parents don't love seeing photos of their children?  The more followers I get, and the more exposed they are to what is going on in the library, the more support I will have for the library from the community.  Hopefully it will also encourage our parents to come along when the library is open to parents - on Friday mornings and in the summer holidays.

I'm excited to get started.  Of course I only have three more weeks this year to give it a go, but that is OK because next year I'm going to start a new album "Stories from the Library", so that I can also show other things the students do in the library at lunchtime.  Launching a new album will be a good time to publicise our page on the school's Facebook page and newsletter.  Then all I have to do is try to be half as good as the amazing Brandon Stanton!

Facebook vs Blogger

Today I launched our library's Facebook page.  I have to confess that I'm not an avid Facebook user personally.  However, when I wanted a way to connect with our wider community to share book reviews, apps and library events, it was a clear winner.

Lots of libraries have blogs but the main problem with them is that not many people know how to use an RSS reader (well that's my opinion but I certainly get a lot of blank stares when I talk about Google Reader). This means that every time you post you need to make a big fuss to try and get people to read your work (like I will shortly with this post!).  Facebook, on the other hand, pushes your messages straight to your fans without them having to do anything except choose to "like" your page.

In order to get people to "like" my page I am shamelessly using a prize ($20 book voucher).  We have a school Facebook page so I will be promoting my page on there, and I've put a notice in our school newsletter too.  If you want to have a look at our library Facebook page, here it is.

I think another benefit is that Facebook posts are short and sweet and therefore people feel they can spare the time to read them.  A lengthier blog post requires a bit more commitment (well done for getting this far!).

I guess it's strange that I'm writing a blog about how much better Facebook is but I am talking specifically about reaching my audience of a school community.  In my professional capacity as a librarian and technology enthusiast you can see that my vote is for Blogger.

By the way, for the first time I have used one of my own photos in my posts (the one I'm using on our Facebook page).  I used an iPad app called Snapseed to add an effect called Grunge.  It was a lot of fun so expect to see more.