Diversity and Inclusion in our library

Diversity and Inclusion in Our Library

We agree about the questionnaire being a bit daunting. We have over 21 nationalities at our school so it’s very difficult to cater for all the children’s individual needs as much as we would like.

We try to read a lot of books to the children that encourage inclusiveness.  Our latest book is ‘We’re all Wonders’ by R.J Palacio.  

A good website to explore celebrating empathy through books is http://www.empathylab.uk/

Every year we celebrate some of our main cultures in the library with books and related activities.  These include Maori Language Week/Waitangi Day, Matariki, Diwali, Sign Language Week, Samoan and Tongan Samoan Language Weeks (We find the series ‘Children of the Pacific’ is a great go to series’).

We have a good range of Maori Myths and Legends.  We don’t always accession these as 398.  We find categorising under the Author’s Name and adding them to the general picture books makes them more accessible for children and more widely read.

We currently have a good range of books to support our Reading Programme for Dyslexic children which is run in the library.

At the beginning of each year the school’s inquiry topic is Turangawaewae.  This year we borrowed books from the National Library to support this topic.  This allowed us to see what was available.  We have now purchased some of the titles that were popular with teachers and students.

We have a number of books about refugees as this is quite a large group at our school.  We recently purchased ‘Stepping Stones’ by Margriet Ruurs.  This is written in Arabic and English and we’d love to find more books like this.  Another recent purchase that highlights the Refugee experience is “My Two Blankets’ by Irena Kobald.  

Two sensitive issues for us in our school are religion and war/violence due to the high number of muslim and refugee children.  So we have to be careful about these themes.