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Westwood School

OPENING TIMES
Monday to Thursdays: 8am – 4pm
Fridays: 8am – 3.30pm

The ‘Not-Just-a-Library' at the Westwood School is the busy, bustling, crowded heart of the school. The Library is very well resourced providing fiction and non-fiction books to support the curriculum and also a huge range of teenage books for ‘reading for pleasure'. We have recently increased our stock with recommended reads for Post-16 students to encourage wider reading. We subscribe to First News a weekly newspaper for ‘young minds', tbk, Flip Side, and various magazines are regularly donated from staff and include Big Issue, National Geographic, Four two four and film and celebrity gossip mags.

Whilst wholeheartedly encouraging reading as the primary activity we also provide board games, computers, Top Trumps, pictures for colouring, Sudokus and personal CD players. We run various clubs throughout the year including board games, quiet reading, Quiddler (a bit like scrabble but with playing cards) and a homework club for Years 7 & 8.

  • The Winter Warmer quiet reading club begins in September with hot chocolate served to readers;
  • We have a SPOOKY storytelling session around Hallowe'en;
  • We dress a tree in the Library for Christmas with Christmas CDs playing;
  • A Chess Tournament takes place in the spring term;
  • We have a Summer Book Café where we serve cold drinks and the Library is dressed with garden parasols for atmosphere.

The teaching staff provide a constant stream of recommended reads and book swaps for our 'Daily Staff Bulletin' and we publicise the Coventry Inspiration Book Awards website encouraging pupils and staff to vote for their favourites.

With our Library Team of pupils we get involved in all aspects of Charity Fund Raising in the school helping to organise Comic Relief fun week; we are official vote counters for the Children in Need ‘Strictly Westwood Dancing' and November sees us filling shoe boxes with donations from the pupils and staff and wrapping them in Christmas paper ready to go to the Salvation Army for distribution.

We are open before and after school, and every break and lunchtime except Wednesday at morning break. There is a rota for computer use during break and lunchtimes with every year group getting at least 3 sessions on the computer per week as well as the before- and after-school sessions.

We are open during lesson times for whole class groups to use the Library for book-based and computer research; we have 6 networked computers and printer.

To encourage independent research skills we run a 6 week course for all Key Stage 3 pupils during their English lessons: Year 7 in the Autumn term, Year 8 in the Spring term and Year 9 in the Summer term. If time (and timetable) allow we have Year 10 web-based research skill quiz sheets to reinforce their skills.


 
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