Learning in Progress

Last year I began to hear discussions about the adoption of the NGSS and saw a lot of chatter about using Legos to help teach young students about Engineering principles.  I saw the anxiety on the faces of some of my teachers as they tried to digest these new standards and new concepts, and thought, in addition to locating appropriate texts to support their lessons, it might be a good idea to be able to provide some Legos for checkout.  I knew it would crush my budget to buy Legos, so I put a request out on Facebook to see if anyone had any Legos they wanted to offload, and within about 10 minutes I had a MAJOR Lego donation. I spent most of the remaining year trying to steal minutes and recruit kids to help me sort the Legos, but by the middle of the October this year, I realized it was just not going to happen, and that I needed to create some awareness that we had them available to use.  After a lot of thought and some Internet searching, I could see where somethi...

Right before school let out for Winter Break, I decided to shake things up in the library and finally experiment with some ideas for Maker Centers that have been gnawing at me since last Spring. My goal was to expose kids to the variety of things they could learn about using library resources or carefully selected Internet resources, and to support our theme for the year: "Read, Create, Collaborate".   I wanted to give kids a chance to tinker, problem solve, imagine, and create.  I also knew that I wanted to make use of many items I already had and supplement with a few key items that I would use to expand our resources.  I also wanted to be sure that the centers connected to our learning standards and could be an example for students and teachers about how they could connect library resources and technology to classroom learning. The Maker Centers After much deliberation and a review of what I had available to me or could get at a reasonable cost, I settled...

In a One Book, One School program all of the students and faculty in a school read the same book and have organized opportunities to discuss the book.  It provides each member of the school community a topic of common discussion, and can help to promote a culture of readers. I wish I could remember where I first heard about One Book, One School. Maybe it was in the back of my mind after hearing about universities using a similar approach, or maybe it came from our public library's newsletter for the One Book, One Community, but I likely got the idea from someone suggesting it through Twitter. I had been seriously considering the idea of trying out a One Book, One School program for about a year before I was finally able figure out the logistics of how I wanted it to work.  I knew what I didn't want it to be. I knew I didn't want it to be a hassle for our families, and I didn't want it to be another assignment, or a huge contest.  I wanted it to generate some exci...

After hearing Jennifer LaGarde (aka Library Girl on Twitter) , speak this summer at KASL's Summer Refresher, I decided that I really needed to do a better job of connecting my library data to my stakeholder's priorities. After surveying my teachers and administrators, I learned that their primary concerns were student growth and success and creating a culture where students could be creative, curious and innovative.  I think our library is an environment that helps support those priorities, and I wanted to highlight that in our library theme and in my report.   I began by checking out some of our beginning of the year student diagnostic tests and comparing that to some of the library statistics I had.  I also tried to connect the report to student priorities; the primary priority for them was to find books that they like, and after improving library organization through genrefication of the fiction section and adding some new signage, I found that our 1st quart...

Connected Librarian Day 2014. I feel incredibly honored to have been asked by Joyce Valenza to share some of the things that I do with my library program.  I am beyond excited to be joining the ranks of some of my favorite librarian heroes. See the full schedule of events and read about all of the incredibly talented presenters at Library 2.0 . For my part, I decided to talk about, communicating to your stakeholders, a subject that has been on my mind quite a bit, especially since I got to hear the fabulous Jennifer LaGarde  (aka Library Girl) speak at KASL Summer Refresher this year. Most recently I've presented on a similar topic at KASL Fall Conference with James Allen . You can see what we talked about for library advocacy [ here ]. I can't wait to share some of the ways that I have been working to create a library presence for my stakeholders that both provides them with what they need and helps to keep our library program and studen...

I shared these tips with my teachers today.  [ Here's ] a direct link to the Smore if it's not working.  While the President Taft resources are a little random, I thought it was a topic to use to compare informational texts.  Students could read the story President Taft is Stuck in the Bath  then compare the account described by the author in the back of the book to some biographical information about Taft and the impact he had on modern doctor/patient relationships.

Here are the latest tips I shared with my teachers. Click [ here ] for the link to the Smore page .

As school librarians we wear many hats: book guru, manager, technology leader, instructional partner, research guide, and our very own public relations firm.   In advocating for our school library programs, we must identify our stakeholder priorities, develop a mission statement that aligns with our district and school mission, develop programming that will meet the needs of our stakeholders and collect data that doesn't just represent the number of books we check out each month, but really connects to the mission of our district and demonstrates how we support student growth. In this post you will find some resources that James Allen and I shared at the KLA/KASL Fall Conference to help develop that long term, ongoing plan to really advocate for your school library program.  The prezi below provides an overview of the topic with research and information from the AASL.  The ThingLinked Piktochart includes some basics of advocacy and additional resources.  F...

These are the tips I'm sharing with my teachers today about a new book in our collection, Hello, Mr Hulot and how it can be used to teach figurative language, legos in the math classroom, and Office 365 tutorials that highlight ways students and teachers can collaborate. The direct link is [ here ].

Here are the tips I shared with my teachers today.  If the embedded Smore doesn't load, here's a direct [ link ].  

These are the Teacher Tips I sent out to my faculty on Sept 2, 2014.  I'm just learning about Plickers and can't wait to try it with my library classes!  I'm also hoping to inspire some higher level of technology integration this year by sharing information about SAMR and how it could relate to Bloom's Taxonomy. For a direct link to the Smore page click [ here ]

As I was finishing moving our fiction section into the new genre sections, I realized that I was going to need new signage.  As students are browsing for books I really want to make sure that the kids can see directly where to go to find their favorite genres, while making browsing a little more user friendly. When I checked out Tiffany Whitehead's ( @librarian_tiff ) post " Ditching Dewey Choosing Genre Categories " I noticed the really cool posters she had to go along with her genre sections.  They had a kind of word cloud feel to them that I really liked. And I thought it would be neat to combine a word cloud that described the section with a picture of the genre sticker I used.  That way my signs would be informative and model a consistent design.   Not Your Ordinary Word Clouds For this particular design concept, Wordle , my go-to word cloud generator, just wasn't going to do.  The Edudemic post " 9 Word Cloud Generators that Aren't Wordle " l...

After a lot of thinking, I finally decided to take the leap this summer and move the fiction section of my elementary library from the traditional first-three-letters-of-the-last- name organization to a genre based organization. Now that the project is almost complete, I cannot wait to get the kids back in the library so I can show them! Deciding Factors There are many reasons individual teacher librarians might choose to genrefy their library.  For me, I was driven to start with the fiction section because I've noticed an alarming drop off in students checking out books by the time they get to fifth grade.  This drop off could be for any number of reasons: increased activities after school, loss of interest in the materials they see on the shelf, lack of time, or they could be overwhelmed by book after book organized by letter. I realized, too, that although my 3-5 graders don't ask for "funny" books or "animal" stories, they seem to get stuck on c...