The holiday season doesn’t truly start for me until NPR’s (National Public Radio) annual book lists are revealed, beginning in late November. If you are a book geek, and I know for a fact that there are a number of you in our community, you have probably already begun to compile your list of titles to read for 2020.

People often ask me what some of my favorite lists are, so here are some to consider, in no particular order:

NPR’s Book Concierge: easy to search, “best of” lists for every conceivable category

WWB (Words Without Borders) The Best Translated Books You Missed in 2019: there are some absolute gems on this list and I love its inclusiveness and scope. For many in our community, you could read the original work rather than the work in translation.

Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of 2019: great lists divided into the following age groups: under 5, 5-9, 9-12, 12-14, 14 and up. Bank Street College “recognizes the importance of diversity in children’s literature and acknowledges and celebrates the voices and cultures of all of our readers” (from “Bank Street College Diversity Statement”).

Book Riot: “Always books, never boring” is Book Riot’s slogan and they deliver on this mission! BR has fantastic lists for every possible subject with witty write-ups. They recently posted this year’s Read Harder Challenge, which might be a fun endeavor for those looking to expand the scope of their reading or for some of our local book clubs to try.

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2019 - easy to search by genre and carefully chosen books. NYT is a great source for book recommendations of all types. This is but one list among many that they publish.

Literary Hub’s The Ultimate Best Books of 2019 List- I like how this list from Literary Hub shows you how many times each work appeared on other “best of” lists. Topping the charts by appearing in 21 “best of” lists are Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (that title!) and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys. 

GoodReads 2019 Reader’s Choice Awards- Goodreads has thousands upon thousands of lists and is an easy to use site that is also fantastic for tracking your own reading, finding book recommendations, and loads more. Their 11th annual Reader’s Choice Awards is a good source for popular titles.

African Arguments: Best Books by African Writers in 2019 So Far- this list and content on this site is published by the Royal African Society, which has close links with SOAS Centre for African Studies at the University of London. This is a great list that should be updated soon.

Enjoy the holiday and happy reading! Please pass along the names of your favorite reads to our library team and send any pictures of your children or family reading to either me at tmaguire@aislusaka.org  or to the Primary School Librarian, Ms. Jill Daley (for pictures of primary students and their families) at jdaley@aislusaka.org. See you in 2020!

Please come by the AISL Library over the break if you are in town! We will be open from 9:00 to 12:00 on the following days:

Saturday 28 December (9:00-12:00)

Saturday 4 January (9:00-12:00)

Saturday 11 January (9:00-12:00)

Saturday 18 January (9:00-12:00)

Note that this Friday 20 December the library will remain OPEN until 14:30 to give everyone a chance to build their holiday reading stacks with recommendations from our staff!

We celebrated Computer Science Education Week in the library across this week. The theme of this year’s Computer Science Education Week is #CSforGood- which centers around an exploration of the ways that computer science can be used to create a “more equitable and sustainable world” (CSforGood).  Many students created short videos they posted to a closed video-sharing platform called Flipgrid in answer to these questions:

• Can you think of any problems in your own life that could be solved or helped using computer science?
• What’s a recent example you’ve seen where technology was used to help solve a pressing problem somewhere in the world?
• Do you think there are ways to use computer science in addressing big issues like healthcare, access to clean water, or poverty?​

Students also used their creativity and problem-solving skills to explore a wide range of hands-on activities, including coding, using modular robotics cubes called Cubelets, designing with 3Doodlers, building radios with Snap Circuit Pro, and more!

The roof repairs to the library are now complete and beginning this Thursday, 5 December, we will be welcoming everyone back to our renovated space! Thank you to all our community members for your patience with this process. Our coffee bar will be ready by the end of the week, too!

We will be OPEN this Saturday for our usual Saturday hours:
9:00-14:00

Please take advantage of this amazing community resource and come with the whole family. We have something for everyone, including board games, a Lego creation area, books for all ages (including board books for tiny humans and lots of adult fiction and non-fiction). We also have air con for the hot days so you can be comfortable while enjoying the space.

Next week we will be celebrating Computer Science Education Week (this used to be Hour of Code Week) in the library. Come have a peek and feel welcome to play with any of the tech tools and activities we will have on offer, including 3-Doodler pens, robotics kits, Cubelets, MakeyMakeys, circuitry kits, augmented reality coloring, and more. We look forward to welcoming everyone back in to our library.

​Our Grade 12 DP students recently shared their Extended Essay findings with Grade 11 students, who are now beginning their EE (extended essay) journeys! The extended essay is an in-depth, 4000 word (max) study of a focused topic chosen from one of the student’s IB Diploma subjects. For many of our students this research influences their choice of university studies and careers.
 
Ms. Murphy, DP Coordinator & EE Coordinator, and Ms. Maguire, Secondary School Librarian & EE Co-Coordinator, have already had two extended essay support classes for the Grade 11 students to introduce them to the nature of the extended essay and to begin interest inventories to help students decide upon a subject area. By January students will have preliminary research questions.
 
Over the next year, the Grade 11 DP students will have more than twenty support classes, focusing on the following topics:

• Understanding the nature of the Extended Essay
• IB Ethical Guidelines for Research
• Academic Honesty and the IB Diploma; Using Turnitin Similarity Index Reports
• Choosing a subject area
• Time management skills
• Understanding subject-specific assessment criteria and methodology
• Analyzing exemplar EE’s in the student's chosen subject area
• Writing a workable research question
• Unpacking the assessment criteria
• Selecting best research tools & using databases effectively
• Source evaluation
• How to read a scholarly (peer reviewed) article
• How to integrate quotes and secondary source material smoothly and effectively
• Review of strong paragraph writing
• Exploring different tools for making &  organizing notes
• Introduction to different types of outlines (for analytical and investigative essays)
• Using citation tools, either Noodle Tools or ZBib, to track citations
• How to write quality reflections (a required component of the EE)

 This past Tuesday we had an EE Parent Coffee Morning. For those who missed it, here is the link to our Extended Essay Libguide. The EE Presentation for Parents is on the home page of this guide. The password is aisl2019. Please contact either Ms. Murphy or Ms. Maguire with any questions!

The AISL Library will be closed through Sunday 1 December due to remediation work on the roof that needs to be completed.  You are very welcome to visit us in the Palm Pavilion during this time, where we have wifi, aircon, and indoor as well as outdoor workspaces. Classes and unit support will continue as scheduled.

We regret this inconvenience and look forward to welcoming everyone back as soon as possible.

Jill, Sam, Lunyunge, and I extend our deep gratitude to the many parents and students who volunteered hours of their time to help us sort and reshelve nearly 25,000 books across this Monday to Wednesday. My grandmother always said "many hands make labor light" and I appreciate her wisdom more than ever in light of what we accomplished as a community, which allowed us to speed the process along.  Even more important than books are the people in the library and we are excited to have you rejoin us in our renovated space!

We still have several projects that we will execute in the weeks ahead now that the building has been officially handed over to us. These projects include re-construction of the coffee bar and the building of treehouse / loft spaces for primary and secondary students. We will also construct some new shelving that will fit underneath the larger windows.

If you are new to AISL and have only visited us in our temporary Palm Pavilion space, please be sure to come see us now that we have moved back in. The space is bright, inviting, and comfortable! We have something for everyone! - Terry Maguire, Secondary School Librarian

We are bidding farewell to our temporary library in the Palm Pavilion. It has been a fantastic space from which to operate while we await the re-roofing & updates to the library. We thank you for your patience in advance while we shift spaces, unpack the containers, and finish up last projects in the library. We are aiming to welcome students back into the library by Wednesday of next week (and are continuing to offer library classes in classrooms in the mean t, but may need to shift this date slightly depending on final details. The coffee bar will be rebuilt in the library over the next couple weeks- stay tuned!