What Can Your Library Do For You?

Hello, fellow teachers!

Welcome to --- What can your library do for you???

I may well update and enrich this post as time passes. As it stands, I’d love to give an overview of the kind of things I, as the librarian, can offer you, the classroom teacher. This list is by no means exhaustive! I welcome queries, out of the box thinking, and new ideas.

First off, the basics! This is the stuff I am supplying regardless:

• Book Selection: At least every week (and more often in the early grades), your students have time to find self-selective books, check them out, read them, and discuss them with me and/or peers. I also build in certain days where they can come in before school, after school, or during lunch. Of course, students can always come in with a pass!

• A wide range of texts: We’re talking picture books, fiction books, nonfiction, and expository. The formats vary too: books, magazines and newspapers, and a host of digital sources.

• Grade-level, NMSL, and ISTE standards: I work to make sure I’m aligning activities and lessons with your grade-level standards, as well as New Mexico School Library Standards and International Standards for Technology in Education. 

• Storytime & Book Talks: Obviously, this looks different for different grades and groups, but reading and listening to enjoyable, quality books and talking about them is central to an engaged, intellectual life.

I use your quarterly survey information to customize the above content to your thematic and standards foci, and also to augment it with different activities. Without further ado, here are some options and ideas:

STORYTIME:

• I read a book to your kiddos in your class (push-in)

• Youtube channel of readalouds for your class

• Collaboration with creating book talks and videos, use of other digital tools such as Novel Effect.

• Puppets, manipulatives, songs, Story Stones, and general strategies.

• Discussion guides, questions, and/or activities with your classroom readalouds
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• Assistance with Sock Puppets, Chatter Pix, and Blabberize for student jigsaw / reteaching activities. 

PUBLISHING:

• Handmade books

• Assistance with essays and research papers (any step of the process)

• Digital book creation: Book Creator, Write Reader Classroom, ScribblePress, Storybird, StoryKit, StoryJumper.

• RPGs, card games, board games, or video games based on course content

• Creating choose your own adventure books

• Websites, blogs, Wakelets, etc. for expository and other nonfiction writing

 

PROCUREMENT:

• Author studies

• Books you adore

• Thematic texts

• Interlibrary Loan

• Open source textbooks

THEMATIC OUTREACH:

• Author visits, correspondence, and/or Skypes

• Thematic visits from local experts, or digital visits from non-local ones

• Cross-curricular planning (within the school and/or community)

GLAD STRATEGIES:

•  Expository

•  Narrative

•  Sentence

•  Chants & Songs

LITERACY CLUBS:

• Book buddies with another class in the school

• Book buddies with another class in another school

• International Book Club (read fiction & nonfiction digital texts and discuss them with classes in different states and/or countries)

• Battle of the Books (grades 4-6)

• Poesía Eres Tú (competición de poesía en español)

And much, much more. Seriously, if you have an upcoming project, and don’t think any of these would fit, chat with me! We’ll sort something fabulous out.

- ¡Hasta pronto!

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