This week I have to do a great project: the creation of a classroom library. This task is quite complicated. The main difficulty of this task is taking into account the real economic situation. During these last years I have to do other projects but I had the possibility to create ideal situations, so this is a big challenge for me.
After deep reflection and research, I realized that there are many different possibilities to offer our students with a rich variety of literature, with not too much money.
The principal one and probably the easiest is asking the students to bring their own books to the class to share with their partners. This is fantastic because we can develop other values such as generosity. Furthermore, there are a lot of disadvantages too. The first one is that we have to adapt our didactics projects according to the kind of literature provided by the students. Another big problem is that, if we want to create a library in our mother tongue the variety of books could be great, but in a foreign language it is more difficult. Most of our students don’t have English books at home. We can to solve this problem by giving them strategies to find the books: Asking older brothers, other members from higher years of the school, cousins… However, this could be a problem too, because there are maybe some parents that don´t agree with idea of sharing and asking others. Anyway, I think taking some risks could be useful, and we should try it.
Another alternative is creating a collective project with the school, to get second hand books. I think this is great, but also we have to assume some risks. We are using the name of the school to carry out a volunteering campaign, and we are going to be responsible for its success or failure. In spite of this risk, if we are finally successfully, this could be a great benefit for all of the school, not just for you own class.
Of course, there are millions of ways to get books with a reduced budget, such as getting them in markets and second hand shops, creating agreements with the editorials… but, as in this post I am just mentioning ways to get free books, I would like to finish by sharing with you a very useful resource. This is the website www.nolotiro.org. In this website we can advertise our necessity of books, or even offer them to others. The involvement of the people in this site is huge. You can receive a lot of donated books. In fact, for my project, I have already advertised my demands.
I hope you find my post useful and I would like to encourage you to visit this website. There are a lot of people waiting for your help: maybe you can be a generous donor!
Hi Carla! I have found your post very useful for all of us, and I also agree with you. We can create great libraries but the main difficulty of this task is to take into account the real economic situation. In the real context it is very important to think about a way to reduce the budget of the materials.
As you say in your post, something that we could do is to ask pupils to bring their own books. In our personal creation of a classroom library we have included this activity; they have to bring their favourite English books to the classroom in order to share them with their classmates. However, it is true that it could create problems because we are dealing with books written in a foreign language and maybe not all of them can participate.
Of course, getting second hand books is a good idea too. I did not know the website you give us, thank you for that. Anyway, another alternative could be to make pupils participate actively in the library classroom by creating their own books. This would be a cross-curricular project because we include more subjects. Thus, we would promote reading, creativity and social, linguistic or artistic skills. Also, we would have more books to read (free books!) and they could feel the satisfaction achieved from having their own books ready for other readers.
Bye!
Hi Eva! Thank you for comment on my post. I found your suggestions very useful; I love the one about the creation of books by students. It is a great idea!!