Teaching Practice Collection

The Teaching Practice Collection (formerly called the School Services Collection) forms part of the learning resources collection. It contains recent children’s fiction and non-fiction, a range of text books to GCSE level, music scores and multimedia items including kits, scientific models, realia and picture sets. All items are listed on the Enterprise catalogue.

Where is it?

The Teaching Practice Collection is located on the 3rd Floor of the Library.

Who might find it useful?

Student teachers – the collection provides material for them to use in schools and to provide a variety of material for them to critically evaluate.

People studying the history of children’s literature – the collection includes some useful material for historical study of children’s literature. Another resource is the Children's Collection held at Special Collections Services, which is located on Redlands Road adjacent to the London Road Campus.

Is it a collection for children to use?

The collection is for student teachers and items are acquired with them in mind. Material is acquired in part to develop the critical ability of teachers.

The collection policy is not the same as for a children’s library, and some items may be considered unsuitable or offensive to children.

Borrowing items from the Teaching Practice Collection

Most items may be borrowed for the duration of the academic semester. You can take out as many books as your borrowing rights allow.

How are the items arranged?

New material

Newer material purchased since Summer 2011 is arranged in three Teaching Practice sequences relating to size:

• normal (TP on the spines)
• folio (TPF)
• oversize (TPO)

Older material

Older material will ultimately be moved into the above sections. Meanwhile it is divided as follows:

• Fiction – alphabetically by author with the spine label prefix 'CF' or, if a larger sized book (folio), 'FCF'. Some popular types of fiction have coloured spine labels to help you select them whilst browsing:
  - collections/short stories have a red spine sticker
  - myths/legends/fairy stories have a yellow spine sticker
  - dual language stories have a blue spine sticker

Other children's resources

You may also want to investigate the Learning Hub, a non-Library resource centre located in Building L24 on the London Road Campus. University of Reading Institute of Education students have full access to all the collections that make up the Learning Hub.

Within the Learning Hub is the Teaching Resource Base which is a collection of children’s books and other resources for teachers to take into school. There is also a Reference Library which consists of publications on education and educational practice.