CAPE DORSET - A retired teacher with a passion for books is hoping to pass her love of reading to the community's children volunteering as the school librarian.

Frances Webber is the volunteer librarian at Sam Pudlat School in Cape Dorset. She is a retired teacher with a passion for books. - photo courtesy of Sam Pudlat School

Frances Webber, a former literacy teacher, said the library now contains a few thousand books, both fiction and non-fiction, and the school is trying to improve and update the selection. Although she likes all books, she said her favourites are Robert Munsch's A promise is a promise and 50 Below Zero.

"The children have been borrowing and taking books home and returning them and we have library activities going on. Everybody seems to be enjoying it, especially me," she said.

"I really feel that reading takes you wherever you want to go and I think if the children learn to read and not just learn but enjoy reading, they will go far."

Webber arrived in Cape Dorset some two years ago after retiring from a 41-year teaching career that took her to Nova Scotia, China and the Yukon.

When she started helping out students at the school, she also noticed the library was in dire need of a librarian. So Webber and a teacher decided to throw away the old books and organize the ones the library had. She decided to volunteer as the school librarian and will continue to do so for at least half the school year.

She said she received no formal training; she just modelled what she saw happening in other schools.

"I do strongly believe in teaching children to read and having books available to children is totally necessary," she said.

"It just does my heart great to see children enjoying books. They really can't learn to read unless they have books and we have a wide variety of both English and Inuktitut books in our library. They use and borrow both.”

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