It was playtime with a difference at the Community Library in Currie Street last week, one of two local libraries that celebrated South African Library Week with exciting activities to promote a life-long love of reading .
It was playtime with a difference at the Community Library in Currie Street last week, one of two local libraries that celebrated South African Library Week with exciting activities to promote a life-long love of reading .
“Some people do not even know that there are libraries,” says Patricia Vubela, Assistant Director of Makana Libraries. The aim of the countrywide initiative, from 17-24 March, was to celebrate these public facilities and to raise awareness about the benefits of using them.
The launch event, organised by the Department of Education, the Makana Municipality and the Department of Sports, Recreation. Arts and Culture, unfolded at Duna Library in Joza on 8 March. Enthusiastic school children competed with each other in an unprepared reading competition and brainteasers, while elder members of the community told stories about cultural traditions.
The Community Library and Fingo Library organised separate events last week. The Community Library invited preschools in the surrounding area to come and play with educational toys donated to the library by the Department of Education. Librarian, Melanie Daniels, also taught them how they should go about handling library books. In the afternoons, schoolchildren wrestled with word puzzles from Huisgenoot magazines, donated by Kingswood College.
It also launched a reading competition at the beginning of the month. Its aim was to encourage more schoolchildren to become members and start borrowing books.
“They must come and tell us how many books they have read, and there will be a little bookworm for writing down the titles and the authors of the specific books,” said Daniels. “But they won’t be able to cheat, because we will ask them one or two questions about each book. The one who has read the most books will get a little prize.”
Fingo Library set up a reading competition with more or less the same goals. At this library, however, participants were given five books each and were encouraged to read all of them by the end of the week.
Vubela’s aim for South African Library Week was to help create a life-long love of reading. She wants to create a book club, where pupils borrow books from the library and then share their reading experiences with other pupils, recommending their favourites.
“We don’t want to just encourage competitions,” said Vubela, “because the children stop reading when the competition is over. We want it to be sustainable.”
Vubela also has another project in the wings, called Adopt a School.
“We’re going to take one school that is under-performing and then try to support them with what material we can,” she said. She has requested a list from the Department of Education of the schools with poor matric results.
“We want to be able to check at the end of next year if we did make a difference,” Vubela said.
