At MRIS Mohali, a library is a place with Open Access System, which is more than an Information Resource Centre wherein students come with full enthusiasm not only to access books but also to do various activities.
Children explore the information from different information resources like reading books, various periodicals, and other reference material. Most of them carry books to their home every day. The library is also a good platform for Life Skill Sessions, Storytelling Sessions, Academic Workshops and Annual Projects. Early Years children give wings to their imagination through picture books, touch and feel books, audiobooks, and pop-up books.
Class-Library connectivity is done during Academic Workshops wherein children visit the library to complete their pending work and review the work done in the class. Children explore the dictionaries, encyclopedias to retrieve the information related to their concerned learning areas or annual projects.
Children take up various activities in the library like vocabulary building by reading newspapers, weaving their own story with new words, writing book reviews, solving word puzzles, crosswords, spotting the difference and many more. Children also make ‘Factual Diaries’ by reading newspapers. All these language differentiated activities provide a happy learning environment, which helps children to keep themselves updated.
Special activities have been designed in the library to mark the importance and celebrate significant days like World Book Day, World Magazine Day, and Birthdays of different Authors etc. Children read their favourite stories, watch and listen to stories online on iPads.
Children look forward to solve ‘Mind Games’ on daily basis which include riddles, puzzles, brain teasers etc. It enhances their problem-solving skills, boosts up their memory, and increases their Intelligence Quotient.
After reading reference books, students display amazing facts on ‘TRIVIA’ tree. It is one of the best practices of the library through which children collect different information on different aspects of life.
One of their favourite activities is to write a ‘Book Review’ after reading their favourite book. Children love this activity as it saves time of the next reader in order to decide whether the book is worth reading or not.
To develop reading habits/skills, MRIS library emphasizes on the following…
- Make reading enjoyable through storytelling
- Use interactive books
- Expose them to books from a variety of genres through organizing ‘Books Tasting’ activity from time to time.
- Organize Edu-trips to different libraries like State Library, District Library, Central State libraries etc. to acquaint them with different sections of different libraries.
- Provide the badges for ‘Star Readers’, ‘TRIVIA Stars’ and ‘Riddle Master’