POW! The North Island Children’s and Young Adult’s Librarians Conference

Juliana Austen, Children’s Advisor, Teri Ta’ala and Dave Tucker attended the POW! North Island children’s and young adult’s librarian conference in Rotorua on 22-23 July 2010

One of the key learnings taken from the conference was that “Kids are reading more, writing more and creating more but in different way.”


The curriculum & the library, presented by Tracy Dyett RNZLIANZ Curriculum Services Librarian

This is an article from Juliana Austen

Tracy outlined the different way students are approaching research in their schools. She explained the “inquiry approach” to learning concepts, which takes an integrated approach involving values and competencies. Resources must reflect the path of a questioning approach, emotional engagement, student choice, authentic real life purpose, challenges and reflection. Books may include fiction and non-fiction on many aspects of a topic including science, art, images, poetry, myths and legends. For online resources, the National library “services to schools” provides quick links and integrated searches to the National library’s databases.
Check it out at: http://schools.natlib.govt.nz/
Tracy’s presentation can be viewed at:http://www.scribd.com/doc/33685504/The-Curriculum-the-Library


Gifted children and reading, presented by Rosemary Cathcart.

This is an article from Teri Ta’ala.

A recurring theme at the conference was the ability of libraries to provide an escape from the outer world in this case for gifted children.

I would hope that all children’s librarians value their younger patrons enough to be aware of and cater to their varied needs. According to Rosemary, gifted children can feel marginalised by the educational system and perhaps even by wider society, and libraries (and great librarians) can amongst other things, provide a place of refuge for the gifted child.

Possibly the library’s most valued customers, gifted children are precocious readers and would give any summer reading programme a run for its money. A gifted child often begins reading before school, reads widely and is capable of becoming deeply absorbed in a particular passion. A great librarian may offer the kind of access to information that a gifted child is desperate for and the library can become a place to exhaust a consuming interest.

Being aware of the needs gifted children can help the library build a repertoire of books around their advanced abilities, our extensive knowledge of our collection can be essential for this. The recommended reading age of books can be misleading for example, when catering to the gifted child. They may also suffer from other problems such as dyslexia or dyspraxia.

Libraries may want to establish a rapport with local schools to work together in introducing their gifted children to the library. Rosemary recommends then harnessing the creativity of the gifted child by giving them books to review or asking them to help with recommended reading lists.

For further reading, see the articles at the REACH Education Consultancy website.

http://www.giftedreach.org.nz/index.html