Today was the day to present the plan! But first we spent some time going around the school meeting teachers and heads of department and finding out the scheduling of the various units of enquiry, which units were to be studied and what the information needs would be. Our first concrete action was going to be getting a selection of books from the NLB through their DEAR scheme.
The DEAR scheme is a bulk lending programme, whereby:
- “The NLB welcomes schools and learning centres, social, welfare, and community organisations which are embarking on the promotion of reading initiatives to borrow books in bulk for their members’ use. This service, called DEAR@Schools and DEAR@Community, is provided free of charge and subjected for renewal on a yearly basis.
All DEAR@Schools and DEAR@Community members are entitled to borrow up to a maximum of 2,000 books for a loan period of 84 days (12 weeks).”
For a school on a limited budget and limited resources (physical and staffing) this is a great way to get resources up and running in a short time frame.
Then the meeting with the Head of School (HOS) to see if we had support for our ambitious plans! Luckily we did, however, not everything could be achieved at once, so we needed to work step-by-step.
The first priority was ordering the books the teachers needed for delivery as soon as possible. We’d arranged a slot with the NLB to do that tomorrow. Then while we are waiting for the book delivery we have to work hard to make sure we have the physical space and the logistics in place for receiving, storing, disbursing, returning and sending the books back to the NLB.
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 