It can be challenging at the end of the school year for a teacher to keep students engaged and learning while matching their level of anticipation for summer break. This past school year a third-grade teacher came to discuss an… Read More ›
Reading Culture
3 Reasons to Love Passive Programming
In August, I attended #BossLibrarianPD put on by K.C. Boyd. This was a free virtual two-day professional development for school librarians featuring presenters from across the country. One such presenter was Holly Brown (@MsBrownsLibrary). She shared a session called Easy… Read More ›
6 Goals for the Library This School Year
This summer has been unique for me. Usually, I jump into professional development opportunities or professional reading, but this summer I have needed a minute. Instead, I have focused on reading for pleasure every day. I have just tried to… Read More ›
Read Posters: Staff “Celebrities” Create a School’s Reading Theme and Culture
A School Library Theme to Inspire the Love of Reading Each year in the school library, I display a reading theme along the back side of the library bookcases that run lengthways through the school’s main transition hallway, which also… Read More ›
Build Summer Reading Joy: Faculty Book Recommendations!
Summer Reading Inspiration In the spring of 2016, I received an e-mail from a friend and English teacher in my building. She invited the entire faculty to contribute to a slideshow she was creating. She encouraged every faculty member to… Read More ›
March Book Madness: A Library Tournament
One of the most frustrating aspects of being a high school librarian is failing to increase the level of leisure reading among the teenagers who frequent my library. There are a handful of dedicated readers who are as enthusiastic as… Read More ›
One School + One Book = A Love of Reading
Creating a culture for reading is a major part of what it means to be a school librarian. It is also an ongoing effort. There will never come a time when we stop encouraging students to read. One of the… Read More ›
Cultivating a School-wide Literacy Culture
A new year naturally makes us more reflective about our school libraries. Being an elementary school librarian tends to be a lonely job. If you’re lucky, you are a part of the resource team, but even that can be lonely… Read More ›
5 Ways to Spread Book Love
This year one of my professional goals was to reflect on how I was promoting a positive reading culture at my school and develop ways to improve it. Improvement implies there is something wrong with what is currently being done…. Read More ›
Important Books for Young People
Polarizing Times Political polarization in the US is at an all-time high. A Pew Research Center study tracks partisan differences across ten specific political values. The study shows the partisan gap has more than doubled between 1994 and 2017. The divide… Read More ›