Check out my blog post for ALSC!

This year I am serving on the Association for Library Services to Children's School Aged Programs and Services Committee.  I'm excited to be a guest blogger for them and invite you to check out my post!

Roll the Dice

 

Supporting Libraries

Book challenges and bans are all over the news.  Are you looking for a way to support libraries and librarians?  Look no further!

The Get Ready. Stay Ready. toolkit is designed by librarians for the community!  Learn how you can stand up for intellectual freedom and the right to read.  Feel free to reach out if you have questions.

School's Back!

School has been back in session for a few weeks now - almost a month for students and five weeks for me!  It's been a time of adjusting to new:  new full-time schedule, new principal, new students!  As the year has started, I have been working on a few key projects that I thought I'd share here.

1. Student orientation - this is a perennial project, but this is the first year for me that students have returned to my current library space.  Last year, we were all returning from online learning due to COVID and kicking off operations in a brand new library building.  As a result, EVERYONE got full, welcome-to-our-library orientation.  This year's 7th and 8th graders, though, are ready for some differentiated learning!  As a result, while 6th grade orientation still focuses on the basics of our library, 7th and 8th graders will get a brief reminder of library basics and then jump into learning about smart, safe, legal use of images they download.

2. Mental health - the COVID pandemic ramped up the community's need for information on mental health resources.  Last year, my parent liaison and our school social worker and I got together to do a DonorsChoose grant for mental health books and student tools for managing anxiety.  This year, the books hit the shelf, and we're hoping to kick off a series of community meetings to discuss mental health issues.  I'm also working on an article on how librarians can support their community's mental health needs from the library, so stay tuned!  In the meantime, students are taking advantage of our new library section.

3. STEM collaboration - We have a new signature program this year, STEM.  I am excited about incorporating STEM into the library.  The STEM coordinator and I are working together to support our students as they begin work on their Science Fair projects, and I am thrilled to have an opportunity to really dig in to inquiry instruction with students.  We'll be using The Big 6 as our framework to talk about the inquiry process from start to finish.  We're also looking to get our makerspace fully up and running.

Stay tuned for more!  

Looking Back

I'm ba-ack!  This past semester has been a wild ride with completing my MLIS degree at the University of South Carolina, catching up on some travel with my family, and then dealing with a round of COVID infections in the family to cap off the school year.  I'm looking forward to a summer of travel and rest!

That said, I'm also thinking about how this school year as gone.  As I reflect back on the past school year, I think about what has worked, what hasn't worked, what I want to change or do better going forward.  I thought I'd share one of my favorite things that worked:  highlighting quick reads!

Like many libraries, my middle school library collection includes "hi-lo" books - books that are written on high interest topics for readers of a certain age but with lower reading comprehension requirements.  For my students, this means the books cover topics of interest to tweens and early teens in a pretty compact format with less complex vocabulary and syntax.  Not surprisingly, students aren't really drawn in by the "hi-lo" label, and I found that most of the hi-lo titles in my collection had circulated ... well ... never!

Which is a disservice because hi-lo does not equal low quality or boring.  My solution: rebranding!  Hi-lo books may not get any love, but "quick reads" definitely do.

Back in December when students were getting close to finals, I pulled all hi-lo books from the stacks and created a special display cart.  Fiction in our library is genre-labeled, so each genre got its own bin.  While it's not pictured here, I later added a bin for nonfiction quick read titles, as well.

I am looking forward to running the circulation numbers again when I complete inventory, but based on my observations of students in action, this display has been a huge success.  The cart attracts English language learners looking for a book that isn't "baby-ish" but also isn't too difficult to understand, developing readers who are working on fluency and vocabulary acquisition, and on-level or advanced readers just looking for something quick to read when they finish classwork.  

Just the other day, two students came in to work collaboratively on a book project that was due the next day.  One of the students had forgotten about the project and needed a book they could ready quickly to complete the project.  The other student - an avid library user - was along to offer support with finding a book.  When the students asked for a book that would allow quick completion of the project, I directed them to the quick reads cart as just the thing they were looking for.  The students selected an action & adventure title, sat down and read the book together, then brainstormed book project ideas that could be completed quickly.  I loved watching them in action!

Looking to grow your hi-low circulation?  Give this concept a try!