Aotearoa’s inaugural School Library Week is happening this week.
School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa – Te Puna Whare Mātauranga a Kura, SLANZA, instigated Aotearoa NZ School Library Week to celebrate the valuable role school libraries have in education and to acknowledge the work of school librarians.
The message of support from Hon Jan Tinetti for Aotearoa NZ School Library Week: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L0ZdCwJ4WU
National and international research has shown the importance and necessity of having a school library, supported by a specialist librarian with an adequate budget, in improving student achievement, well-being, literacy, and in building information literacy, critical thinking and a love of life-long reading.
Dr Margaret Merga stated in an August 2022 research paper commissioned by The Education Hub, Turning Boys of all Ages into Life-long Readers, that in order to encourage reading we need to support access to books:
“… we need a book-rich and well-resourced library in all schools, and qualified school library professionals to staff them.”
For Library Week, an activity guide specifically designed by SLANZA and award-winning illustrator Paul Beavis, helped schools across Aotearoa celebrate their library spaces with suggestions for fun activities and a selection of helpful links.
Sponsorship enabled SLANZA to run a competition with book prizes whereby we invited schools and their libraries to share School Library Week-inspired activities via social media using the #AotearoaSchoolLibraryWeek hashtag.
The Aotearoa NZ School Library Week raises the profile of school libraries. It normalises the need for our tamariki to have access to this valuable resource.
We hope Aotearoa NZ School Library Week will provoke discussions on the correlation between Aotearoa’s crisis in declining literacy rates among our children and teenagers, and that fewer than a third of schools and kura in Aotearoa have paid library staff.
