Library overhaul part 1

 

How bad have I been on the old blogging front lately?  I know, terrible but in my defence, I have a great excuse!!

 

About a month ago, myself & 2 other mums from my son's school were asked if we'd help to set up a new library in the school.  We were all really keen to do this as quite frankly, the existing 'library' was pretty shocking ie. a couple of bookcases in a hallway!

 

First of all, we took over what was the music room & special education needs room & realised they both needed blitzing as the décor was extremely bleurgh!  We along with the head teacher, spent a morning visiting some local school libraries to see what they'd done with them & came back bursting with ideas.  After much debating, we decided to keep the walls neutral & then add colour with posters, murals & displays.

 

So work began last week!  After 6 hours of de-stapling & filling the walls in the horrible school-toilet-blue SEN room, the first of many coats of magnolia went on the walls.  We just have to now paint the tiles & cupboard doors in here & we'll have a blank canvas to work from.  This will now become a reading area & the music room.

 

The room which used to be the music room will now become the library & again, the walls have been neutralised & are ready to go!  We've already sifted through a couple of thousand books & binned the old, ripped books & are selling the ones we no longer want/need.  Any left over will go to charity.

 

We've installed the Junior Librarian software on our pc & this'll get set up on our fab new reception desk that my lovely hubby is making for the school!

 

So after the painting is completed this week, we'll begin the huge task of updating the book catalogue & then making a list of the many, many new books we have to buy - this part I'm really looking forward to!

 

We organised a Pamper Night fundraiser which was held last Friday night & we raised over £700 to go towards books & resources for the library, which was fantastic!  So apologies for being MIA for a few weeks, but being at the school day long & then getting home & catching up on housework etc has left me short on time!

 

Here's what we've been doing so far......

 

 

 

 

 

I can't wait to put the final photos of the finished library up......watch this space!!

 

 

 

 

Silent Sunday

                                      

Bad blogger alert!

I've been seriously neglecting my blog for the last couple of weeks, my bad!! In my defence, I've had such a chock-full fortnight starting with a 5 day visit from the in-laws so we were out & about during the days. 

Then a couple of weeks back, myself & 2 other mums from my son's primary school were asked by the new headteacher if we would be up for the challenge of starting a new library for the school.  I have to admit, as a complete & utter bookworm, this really, really pleased me as I believe it's so important for ALL schools to encourage reading & provide a library of sorts, no matter what size.

So over the space of 4 days last week, we sifted through around 3000 old scabby books that the school had in storage & have got rid of three quarters of them.  We've now got to go on a Junior Librarian course to learn how to catalogue & arrange new books & to train up some of the Primary 7s to be Junior Librarians.  We've got a budget to decorate 2 new rooms for the new library & then buy a heap of new books & we've got to do some serious fundraising too!

We went on tours of some local schools to see what they've done with their libraries & have got some amazing ideas what to do now.  So it's going to be a really busy few months ahead of us but I'm so excited & I haven't been so riled up about a project for years!! 

But annoyingly yesterday, my phone completely died a death & guess who hadn't downloaded all my photos & blog drafts??? So I promise I'll get back on it soon but I need to re-take a LOT of blog photos & I'll be spending an awful lot of time at the school every day.........but I WILL get back on form soon!!

Toodles!