Sunday, November 27, 2011

World Languages: A new section

We have a new section in our library. It's been growing since last spring and is steadily becoming a draw for our students who are just starting to learn English. 

My goal is to have at least a few books in each language spoken by students at our school. So far we have Korean, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, Hungarian, Swedish, German, and Polish.

These books were donated by various embassies and parents. Last year, our library intern, Jet Willette (@libraryjet) started the project by contacting all the embassies in Budapest, collecting books they donated, and cataloging them in our Destiny online database. This year, we've continued the project and donations are still coming in.

When a student who does not yet speak English joins our school, it is so powerful to be able to point him or her to a book to check out in his/her home language. What a source of pride it is for the child to show new classmates, too!

These books are organized by this call number:
WL - (World Language)
KOR - (First three letters of the language)
SHA - (First three letters of author's last name)


2 comments:

  1. Hi. At IST we are fortunate to have a very robust WL collection. The bulk of it has come from corporate donations. Our call numbers are like yours and sometimes we add one more line with BL for bilingual.

    Congratulations! Felicitações! 축하! お祝い! 祝贺! Mazel tov! Gratulálok! Glückwünsche! Grattis! Gratulacje!

    ReplyDelete
  2. hmmm I hadn't thought of asking for donations. Great idea. My school has almost 50% of students from around the world--and I have been trying to get more books in other languages.

    ReplyDelete