Open Books, Open Minds

This post has been a long time coming! Every time I almost write a proper entry about it, something else happens, and stories that started out in my head as short footnotes take up a whole page and end up totally overtaking. So here we go – a timeline of photos should give you some idea of what we’ve managed over the last few months.

We started from scratch : moving those bookcases, cleaning all the surfaces and sorting through the books (4th February)

By 21st February, we had separated the books into fiction and non-fiction, and were busy splitting the non-fiction section into ten divisions by topic.

This was taken on 5th March. Fiction had been labelled with call numbers, taped and alphabetised;  at this point, we had done the same with non-fiction and were starting to put them all back in order.

By the 7th March, you could take a picture of some spines, pretend you had a proper-looking library already and almost kid yourself that there wasn't that much more to do.... 

...but then it took us until the last week of March to sort the rest of them  out and finish. Phew!

The finished product at the end of March. We're using the bookcases to separate the library space from the classroom  that shares the same room, and trying to decorate the backs with some posters. You can also see the mural painted nearly 20 years ago: open books, open minds.

The only teeny, tiny, incy-wincy thing is that it doesn’t look like that at the moment.

We’ve had to pack it all up.

Absolutely breaks my heart taking the whole thing to pieces again. But the wonderful news is that the reason it’s being taken apart is to prepare for greater things. A German firm is sponsoring the development of a computer lab for Nowak Primary School, which is being installed over the school holidays. The room will be painted, 12 computers installed, and we will most likely have wireless Internet access. I can’t tell you how exciting this is – not just because I get tangled up in cables every time I try and hook up my laptop to the dial-up broadband (I am neither coordinated nor good with technology), but it’s. One of our subjects is BIS, ultimately a class in media skills, and although we have started using the library as best we can, it will be brilliant to have some computers. Computer literacy will be a whole new set of skills for them, and after school classes will be offered to the most competent, well behaved learners in each grade. I’ve really come to love finding these opportunities for kids that really deserve a reward: it sounds so terribly cheesy and all very gap-year-y, but chances like these are a big deal for kids at a rural primary school in a region so affected by Namibia’s socio-economic inequalities.Our school is involved in the British Council’s Connecting Classrooms initiative, and we’ve already sent off our first parcel of students’ letters and drawings to our partner school in Yorkshire. Taking those kids with the best work outside and telling them that their work has been chosen  is an absolute joy to watch:  they’re really excited, super proud of themselves and a number of them asked me on Monday morning whether the parcel had been sent safely. You could also see that it took the rest of the class by surprise: they don’t often get opportunities like these, and you could see that they hadn’t really twigged that yes, Miss Macmillan and Miss Mortimer were serious about sending the best work all the way to the UK and yes, they did expect you to put some effort in if you wanted your work to be included. This programme seems to have really captured their attention, and so with computer access, they can get all the more involved online with the programme for themselves.

It will mean I have to take on a bit of ICT teaching, which is a terrifying thought given how truly terrible I am with computers. “Switch it off, switch it on again” may have to get painted on the wall too!