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...