The project that I do here, VITEL, focuses on improving literacy teaching here in Vanuatu. We're supposed to work with teachers to get them to do learner-centered instruction, phonics, word wall, sight words, etc. One of the other big parts, though, is that we're supposed to help schools find materials for instruction. One of the most obvious ways to do this is by setting up or improving school libraries so that teachers and students have access to these materials. I think we don't think in America about how utterly surrounded we are by English language print: books, advertisements, even just labels on food products. On my island, honestly ... Most families do not have books apart from Bibles, and no one is rich enough to eat lots of food from stores. In class, they're mostly looking at the textbooks. The textbooks here aren't terrible, but they are not sufficient for getting kids to really experience English.
I was pretty lucky and this project went over really well. I got about 800 books shipped to me by Rotary in January of 2013. Later, I got about another 60 books shipped by a yacht charter and found some more new books hidden behind the sports materials. (This is a big issue at a lot of schools: sometimes you have the materials where you are but no one knows where it is.)
I went through all of the books that we currently had and tossed everything that was useless or really dirty. My theory in trashing books was that I wanted to be on the generous side with the library; if a book was just a little dirty or had a bad spine, I used tape to repair books, but if it was just totally trashed, time to go. Kids can even use an expired atlas, if push comes to shove, but it has to be clean and neat.
Then I sorted the fiction books into four levels, putting colored stickers on the spines. Each color got its own shelf. I didn't bother to do a card catalog because the library is still small enough to scan the shelves. Nonfiction got its own color, and then I separated out teachers materials, School Journals (NZ school magazines), Vanua Readers (Vanuatu-themed stories) and other Vanuatu-related materials.
Clean up, clean up...
Olive (my super cool Class 2 teacher)
Oh luk, not dirty anymore
Unfortunately, these walls are actually really against glue tack. I need to just buy some super glue and make them properly stick.
Steve, Me, Charlie, Kiki, Tommy, on the morning of the library opening. We had a little program -- cutting open a ribbon, toktoks, and some snacks.
Elder Marang opens the library.
So flas.
So the library isn't normally a classroom, but it works as one too, sometimes. This is from earlier this year when I was substitute teaching class one. There are chairs and tables in the back and sides, but the front part of the library has mats and the kids can work off of the black board. It's also a space for kids to study and to do their work, especially for the kids in Class 4/5. That class is huge -- like 30 students -- and if they try to do group work, they really need more space.
Things I learned from this project:
1. Lending libraries are a ton of work. As the responsible teacher, you have to chase students down ALL THE TIME. Don't do it. Reading rooms are the best.
2. Make it incredibly, incredibly, incredibly obvious where the books go. I originally did not put stickers on the books, and students slowly reshuffled them out of their mix. Also, straight up write grade levels on the front of books.
3. The easier it is to find a suitable book, the more likely a teacher or a student will actually go grab a book. It has to be really, really easy, like, go to one book shelf and grab a book. You can't ask a student to try and judge a book if they're not used to reading a lot.
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