My first days: back to elementary school

...this time from the perspective of (library) staff! After only a 5 min walk to work I got a house tour and introductions to most of the teachers. Mäntytie is a library of one room but could fill probably at least one more with their media, which leads me to one of my projects for the next 9 weeks in both locations: sorting out books. The library of The English School was managed part-time for a long time before my mentor started their job three years ago and it seems to me like no one really thought about making space for their newly acquired books by getting rid of unused or outdated ones. (A life lesson for everyone with a lot of other things too I suppose...)

In the elementary school library teachers usually book a fixed time frame each week to visit the library with their classes, so I also have a timetable again! Between visits we check in the returns and reshelve books as fast as we can. It was very clear which books are really popular here: "Aku Ankka" (Donald Duck and not Mickey Mouse!), "Dog man" by Dave Pilker, "Geronimo Stilton" by Elisabetta Dami or "Diary of a wimpy kid" by Jeff Kinney (in Germany known as Gregs Tagebuch). Some of those I know from my public library internship in Germany.

I was also tasked to collect books for the small theme table. I tried to include books for a variety of reading levels in Finnish and in English and found a cool lyrical book about the history of rap ("The roots of rap" by Carole Boston Weatherford) in the online catalog. It had such flashy illustrations with short poetry lines underneath that I decided to make it the center piece of the round table about music. Around it I put a picture book about children forming an orchestra out of kitchen gadgets, one non-fiction book about opera, and another fiction book about a music fairy named Melodie among others.

One morning a teacher gave us presentations of her class about their favorite books to put them up in one of our displays. The children had to represent their chosen book by designing a paper bag advertising it and putting five things inside that reminded them of the book. My favorite was "Harry Potter ja viisasten kivi" (Philosopher's stone / Stein der Weisen) where a student put a stick, a small stone, a piece of paper with a simple drawing of a house, and a pair of safety goggles in the very minimalisticly "decorated" paper bag. It made me smile. Very efficient! He only needed four things to relay everything important! Sadly I can't post any pictures of them here because of student data protection.

Occasionally we also hang book recommendation slips from the children onto the designated walls in the hallways of that age group. Usually my mentor checks the info on them and marks the paper with a sticker "info added" when they changed something but some snippets are also just cryptic. Students are still learning! (^_^)d

Overall my first days were really relaxed (apart from the library system not working on Wednesday morning) and my mentor was eager to show me everything so I felt more than welcome. Before I started working I was a bit concerned about the children being too loud or unruly but they are actually rather shy, very well behaved, and rarely had to be reminded to put their shoes off the furniture or be a bit more quiet. I'm really looking forward to work there again!