Premier's Reading Challenge 2012

It's that time of year again! The Premier's Reading Challenge has officially begun and so it would be great to see as many students participating in it as possible, especially since it is the National Year of Reading this year.

As most of you would know, last year the Seaford Library, in conjunction with the Friends of the Seaford Library, donated an iPad2 as an incentive for students to complete the challenge, and one lucky student who completed the challenge received this amazing prize. Obviously we will probably need to continue this tradition of a prize now, but what exactly this year's prize is, is yet to be decided.

If you can encourage as many students to be involved as possible, it would be great- and even better, if you could do it as a class it would be amazing! Given that 46% of adults in Australia do not even have the basic literacy skills to read a bus timetable or medicine instructions, we need to promote reading as much as possible....

Oh, and for those of you who were wondering, Roxette were AMAZING!! (both times)!!!

Induction of new students and information sessions

Well, my voice is nearly non existent (phew! I hear you all say!) and I am sick of hearing myself talk after 2 days of solid inductions and information sessions to students.

Hopefully now the new students feel more comfortable coming into the library and are familiar with their new surroundings. It was great to see their excitement when realising that we had the '2012' version of the Guinness Book of Records, or that we had an Xbox, Wii, Nintendo 3DS and iPads. "At Primary School we never had this stuff" was a comment I heard on multiple occasions.

Thanks to the teachers that have encouraged and supported these sessions and I hope you have found them useful for your students.

Now I must go and rest my voice so that it is ready for 2 Roxette concerts in the next 5 days! Woohoo!

Helping your students choose the right books

If you are bringing your students over to the library to borrow individual novels, please be aware that we have a Children's Fiction collection as well as the Youth Fiction collection. There is significant crossover between these collections, so please make it clear to your students that there are more choices for them if they cannot find a suitable book.


The Children's collection is in the Children's library and is appropriate for students up to about Year 8, but some of these students may also be more advanced and wish to choose from the Youth Fiction collection, located next to the Macbook Trolley area with the purple wall.

For older students with low literacy, we also have plenty of "high interest low level" books that look at more mature topics and these are located in the Youth Fiction area.

As always, if you or your students need any help finding appropriate reading material, please don't hesitate to ask myself or other library staff.





Subscribing to this blog....

It's been an exciting afternoon here in the library, with the discovery of a tool which will allow you to receive email updates each time I add a new post to my blog. If you are interested in keeping up to date with what is happening in the library or any new resources that might be available to you, it would be great if you subscribed. All you need to do is type in your preferred email address into the little text box where it says 'Get emails with blog updates' (just above the holiday countdown) and you should receive an email each time I add a new post.

You can also make comments on any of my posts by using your Google account details or by posting anonymously if you do not have a Google account. If you post anonymously, it would be great if you could write your name after your comment so I know who to respond to :)

I really hope you find this useful....

Library Orientation information

This year the Library Orientation tours will operate differently. They will be specifically aimed at new students to our school who are not familiar with the processes and procedures. This means that this year, teachers will not be able to book their whole class in for a session.

Later in the year, all classes will  be given a lesson on how to use the new Library Management System after it has been implemented, so until then, this is purely an introduction for new students to our library so that they understand procedures and how we operate.

There will be set times for students to attend an orientation session. They are:

Monday 13th Feb
- Session 1: 8.50am
- Session 2: 10.55am
- Session 3: 1.20pm

Tuesday 14th Feb
- Session 4: 10.55am
- Session 5: 1.20pm


As you can appreciate, these times are set times and are worked around other appointments and commitments I have and are therefore cannot be changed.

If you wish to book any students into one of these timeslots, please email me the names of the students and the session they will be attending (this is probably best done by caregroup teachers so no one doubles up). I will need these names so that I can keep the numbers at a suitable level and will unfortunately have to send students back if you have not given me their name. The session will go for approximately 1 lesson.

Thanks