We are ending the school year on a high in the library! Check out our new bilingual labelling (big thanks to the admin and TTRR team) and our new furniture, a low table and comfy cushions, which are proving to be very popular at lunchtimes.

And lastly a huge thank you to the student librarians who have been an amazing help in the library this year.

This week in the library we celebrate the wonderful research and publication skills of our senior students in Kāhu 16 who have produced a selection of resources about rivers across the world. 
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Thank you to Kāhu and to Wayne Matthews for sharing your books with us. They are on display and ready to issue this week you can find them anytime in our non-fiction section under Geography.

​THEN by Morris Gleitzman
REVIEWED BY AUDREY W
 
This book is set around the time of World War One and is the second in a series called Felix and Zelda.
Here is a quick summary:
 
A 10-year-old boy called Felix and a 6-year-old girl called Zelda are on a train bound for a Polish concentration camp! They manage to escape with their friend, who passed away from bullet wounds.

They find a woman called Genia who provides a home and new identity’s that will help them evade the NAZI’s. So they become Willum and Violetta, the Polish versions of their favourite book characters. Then disaster strikes and Felix finds himself alone among the company of Genia’s veteran husband. Does Felix have what it takes to survive the NAZI’s? Read this book to find out!
 
I recommend this book for ages 10 and over! This is only because it is a tragic book and will almost certainly make you cry, but also because I don’t think it would be a good idea to make younger children preadjust against Germans! And the fact that this story is truer than you’d think!
 
I give it a 5 star rating       

This term we have been buying lots of new books to represent everyone in the St Albans School whānau.

​We have some wonderful picture books for juniors and seniors, and non-fiction, and we are slowly building our bi-lingual book collection.

Any suggestions are welcome as we continue to bring the diversity of the world into our school library. Come and check out the new titles on display this week.

Author Belinda O'Keefe came to visit us this week, bringing with her a table full of vegetables, some fantastic green slime and wonderful readings for the whole school from her books.

Belinda is the author of  The Day the Plants Fought Back,  finalist for the Best First Book Award at the 2020 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults, and the newly released chapter book, Partners in Slime,  which won the 2020 Tom Fitzgibbon Award. 

Belinda lives in Ōtautahi with her husband, two sons, two cats and four chickens, taking inspiration for her writing from her family's adventures.

Ngā mihi nui Belinda for sharing your love of storytelling with us. 

Lunch time in the library is a time to issue and return books, to find a quiet spot to read, to draw and colour in, or to play board games or Lego with your friends.

The library is open at lunch time on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, with our wonderful student librarians there to help anyone out - they even read books to our younger students. Ngā mihi to Ella for hosting a great reading session last week.



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Last week we took part in National Simultaneous Storytime, joining schools around the world to hear NASA astronaut Dr Shannon Walker read Give Me Some Space! by Philip Bunting,  live from the International Space Station.

​And we celebrated all things space, stories set in space and facts about our universe, in the library.

​A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket is a good book series for children around the age of 8-10 years.

It has a lot of mixed feelings of sad, happy and nervous.
While being enjoyable reads, I wouldn't recommend it
for children under 7 years old.

It will make you feel like you're running from Count Olaf
with the Baudelaire children because of its a
​amazing descriptive writing.

I would give it a 4.5 star rating.

Reviewed by Audrey

This week in the library check out the student librarian's favourite books. They are a bunch of diverse readers with everything from picture books and novels to graphic novels (the favs of the entire school at the moment are the Dog Man series by Dav Pilkey and the Sisters series by Raina Telgemeier). 
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All of these books are ready to be issued and taken home to read.