A school has developed a library curriculum for students during the Covid pandemic to encourage them to read more.

Garden High International School has introduced the curriculum in July, as part of which students from Class VIII to XII are being given a genre each month and they are picking books from the collection at home, downloading them from the Net or having links to e-books sent by the school.

The reading is followed by discussions, quizzes, skits like inviting a character to dinner. A Class VIII student invited Rusty after reading Ruskin Bond’s Room on the Roof and had a conversation with him and a Class X student picked up the Avoxes from The Hunger Games to make a film on.

They will also have an assessment each month and the grade awarded for that will be reflected in report cards. Remarks from the library-in-charge will feature, too, in the report cards.

“Why should students focus only on subjects that they will appear for in the boards. They have to read, differentiate between genres, prepare for research and learn to independently access information,” said Anuradha Das, the director of Garden High International School.

But the school does not want to take away the joy of reading and hence evaluation will be about book reviews, audio and video presentation.

“The activities have to engage the child and not be cliches or such that they can do after reading the synopsis and not the book,” said Anuradha Ganguly, manager, resources and library systems.

Each month till May next year will be dedicated to a different genre from classics, war stories or even band books and every class is given a library period once a week.

The curriculum — designed by Das, Ganguly and Nandini Mukherjee, the dean of students — also includes library orientation, readiness, learning about bibliography, citation and ethics and plagiarism.

The school’s library has 19,000 books comprising fiction, non-fiction and reference books. The library is the “heart” of the school, according to Indranath Guha, the chairman of Satikanta Guha Foundation, which runs Garden High International and two other schools.

“If students and teachers make a requisition of a book which is not available, the school buys it if it is worthy to be in the library,” said Das. “We had to think about how we could include the library in our online classes. When the situation normalises we will pick up things that we introduced during this period and bring it in our physical classrooms.”

The school feels it will introduce boys and girls to research and the age for doing research is also going down.

Das said earlier students would do research only in masters or graduation but now in some of the international curriculum even high school students are expected to do research.

“It’s not that all students do not read. But even those who read they flounder when they have to do research and hence we want to prepare them for it also,” said Ganguly.