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...