The AISL library staff and some fabulous secondary student volunteers have been working hard to pack up the library in advance of the building work being done across the holiday. Moving 24,000 books and all the shelving and furnishings is quite a process! Fortunately, our returning students and community members checked out towering holiday stacks of books, which lightened our load and will keep everyone reading. We will be opening a smaller-scale library in the Palm Pavilion at the start of the year (with the coffee bar!) until the construction work is done. Please visit us there in August. We look forward to welcoming everyone back and will have approximately 1500 new titles for you to browse when our annual shipment arrives!

The results are in! AISL secondary students who participated in our reading challenge this year voted on their top choice for the MS Leopard's Paw book award and the HS Leopard's Eye book award. Students read two of the four (or five for HS contenders) short-listed books (the short-lists were created by students) and then voted via Google Forms for what they felt was the best book in the AISL library. At this week's assembly AISL middle school students Ethan and Scott announced the Leopard's Paw winner and AISL high school student Matteo announced the Leopard's Eye winner. The winners were no surprises! Put these incredible titles on your to be read list if you haven't read them already.

Please join us beginning at 17:00 on Wednesday, 12 June in the Tiyende Pamodzi Theater (note the venue change from the Pavilion due to some of our relocation projects) for an evening with Zambian author Namwali Serpell. Ms. Serpell's novel The Old Drift, which spans four generations of Zambian history, has garnered rave reviews from all over the globe. Ms. Serpell is coming to us directly from the airport, so we are hoping for on-time flights!  This will be a relaxed evening with some entertainment, a cash bar, and complimentary tea & coffee. Admission is free and is open to the AISL Community and friends. Ms. Serpell is hosting public talks later in the week; please see her website for details. Note that Ms. Serpell's novel is a work of adult fiction, so its main appeal will most likely be for students going into Grade 11 and up.

We will have 30 more copies of The Old Drift for sale at the event in case you'd like to purchase additional ones for the book-signing. The cost is 150 kwacha (cash) payable directly to Penguin Randomhouse publishers.

Though the timing of this event is not ideal given that the next day is the last day for students and many families are preparing to board planes, we didn't want to miss the opportunity to connect our community with this prodigious talent. We hope you can come! 

It's time to make your reading stack for the long holiday! Please pass by the library to check out up to 10 items for the long break (for returning patrons with clear records). Books will be due back the first day of school, which is 8 August 2019. Secondary students will be taking their stacks home through Monday of next week. After that we are packing up the shelves for the shift into the storage containers for the re-roofing of the library. The selection is fantastic as so much has come back over the past week. Help us empty out our shelves by stocking up on great reads!

Audiobooksync has another fantastic line-up of free audio downloads! Don't forget that you need to have Overdrive installed on your device (which is free) and that you need to download the books the week they are available (in other words, you will not be able to get books from previous weeks). One of the free downloads coming up the week of 30 May is Wild Bird by Wendelin Van Draanen, which is awesome YA realistic fiction! Need help? Ask any member of our AISL Library Team.

Please join us Wednesday, 12 June from 17:00-18:30 in the Palm Pavilion for an evening with Zambian author Namwali Serpell. We will have entertainment, tea, coffee, and a cash bar. Ms. Serpell's new novel, The Old Drift, has met with rave reviews and international acclaim. The novel spans four generations of Zambian history including the building of Kariba Dam, the Zambian Space Program, and even recent political events. The writing is spectacular.

The AISL library has eight copies left for anyone who missed ordering the first time around. Penguin Randomhouse Publishers will have 32 more copies for sale the evening of her visit. The copies are 150 kwacha each (paperback).

This event is open to the AISL Community and friends. The novel is a work of adult fiction and, as such, would not have much appeal to students other than our 11th and 12th grade DP Literature or DP Language & Literature students (Grade 10 students also welcome).  Ms. Serpell will be visiting other venues in Lusaka later in the week. For more information, please see her book tour schedule. We hope to see you there!

Monday, 20 May is the return date for all library books. We are grateful to the AISL community for understanding that this earlier date reflects our need to do inventory earlier than usual so we can pack the entire (and we do mean ENTIRE) library into shipping containers so that the roof of the library can be replaced.

Though this is inconvenient, it's also an opportunity to take advantage of the great audio books we have available to our community.

Our school has a K-12 subscription to Tales2Go audio books, which has instant, unlimited access to more than 7500 audio books! Many are also available in French and Spanish and also as bilingual audio books. Every student in our school has a unique log-in for this fabulous resource. The log-in details are right on the virtual library landing pages and any members of the AISL Library Team are happy to help. Note that the books stream rather than download, but entire segments up to two hours long in some cases will load at a time. The app is the way to go as the interface is so easy to use and kids can search in many different ways, including by age, author, genre, series, or grade level.

A second fantastic audio resource we have now through 1 August is brought to us by Audiobooksync.com. Audiobooksync partners with many organizations to offer ages 13+ two FREE audiobook downloads a week through August 1. This means you own the books you download. The two weekly offerings are paired thematically and many of them are very popular YA titles and several have great appeal to middle grade readers and adults, too. This is basically a free giveaway of more than $300 worth of audio books to support literacy. Even if you don't have time to listen now, consider downloading the books so you have them all for the holiday or a future time. You will need to have the free app called Overdrive installed on the device(s) of your choice.

This past Tuesday Mr. Tony Potts, Primary Assistant Principal, together with Ms. Terry Maguire, Secondary Librarian, met with interested parents to share ideas and resources for holiday enrichment.

If you were unable to be there but would like to see some of the resources we discussed, please explore our Holiday Learning Libguide, which has resources for both primary school students and secondary school students (simply click on the tab for the level you wish to see). Note that the password is the same as the one for parent portal & entire virtual library system.

We also talked about how the school holiday offers many families a time to re-connect and recreate together, often as a result of having a bit more time in the day for pursuing other activities. Time spent together and nurturing family relationships are equally important aspects of holiday enrichment We encourage families to share ideas for simple rituals they might all enjoy together in addition to having personal learning goals for the holiday break.

This past Monday the MYP Gr9 Individuals & Societies students together with teacher Edward Chow Worn and secondary librarian Terry Maguire travelled to Chipapa Primary School near Lilayi for an up-close look at high quality, long-term, sustainable development projects. This trip formed part of a unit on poverty interventions that students have explored over the past month. 

Mr. Alfonsias Haamanjanji & Mrs. Pamela Chama of World Vision visited AISL several weeks ago to answer students' questions related to World Vision projects and goals. The World Vision staff then organized an incredible program for our students during the field trip that included a visit to the Chipapa Primary School to hear the Gr5-7 girls perform their spoken word piece about ending child marriage, to see how the school's WASH club (water, sanitation, and health) promotes hygeine and water safety, and to learn about the school's literacy approach and commitment to a text-rich environment. Following the school visit, students went by bus to the nearby community of Makangwe to hear testimonials (through a translator) of how the well established in 2017 has transformed the local economy, health, and the safety of children who would otherwise be quite vulnerable travelling long distances for water.

For many of our students, this trip provided an intimate look at how development shapes individual lives. It also gave students a much deeper appreciation for the challenges many rural Zambians face on a daily basis. We will be looking at ways to contribute to the communities we visited as a show of our appreciation for what was one of the best learning experiences many of us have ever had. Huge thank you to Mr. Alfonsias Hammanjani, Ms. Agatha Mali, Mrs. Barbara Sampa, Mrs. Pamela Chama, Mr. John Hasse (AISL parent & World Vision National Director for Zambia), and Headmistress Barbara of Chipapa Primary School for organizing this valuable experience for our students.