More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 27 - February 27, 2021
They are places where students are empowered to share their voices, be independent thinkers, and participate in the global digital community. They are places where students are preparing for the future today.
They are also welcoming places of refuge, and places to call home.
Libraries need to take their cues from the way a house is set up.
Does the environment foster growth and independence in a nurturing atmosphere?
Declutter. Do your patrons suffer from sensory overload when they enter the library?
Create a short list of positive expectations, rather than the list of “do-nots.”
Attach anti-slip tape to the bottoms of bookends to keep books in place,
and use PVC pipe to create a storage system for headphones.
use both text and images to make it easier for all students,
Add color. Embrace color, but be sure to choose a complementary palette appropriate for the ages of your students. Experiment with functional paint (magnetic paint, chalkboard paint, or dry-erase)
Decorate. Display student-created art on the tops of your bookcases, and invite your students to design book carts, reading chairs, murals, or even ceiling tiles. Jazz up bookshelves with contact paper.
plants help to soften sharp visual corners,
Use the Google Cardboard app to create a 360-degree panorama for a better picture, and then make a list of what has been working well and what you would like to improve.
Create a paper or digital survey to find out what your students and colleagues are thinking. What do they like about the space? What don’t they like?
Noam Chomsky said, “If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.”
Students of the Career and Technical Education Program participated in the design thinking
Todd purchased shower board, an inexpensive covering for shower stalls that is essentially medium-density fiberboard with a melamine coating on it. For the cost of one whiteboard,
Libraries serve not only as classrooms but also as learning commons for the entire school community. When you take the time to consider how the library is really used, you can redesign it in ways that increase the number of programs and make them more efficient.
School librarians are managers of programs, paper, and most important—people. But sometimes the housekeeping aspects of libraries get in the way of teaching, which is what we are initially hired to do.
Today’s libraries are vibrant places of learning where we need to encourage students to share their voices, while also creating collaborative connections with faculty and administrators.
Take a moment to consider using “Yes, and” to open the conversation instead, and go from there.
A library is not just a place, it is a service-and students are our customers. The better the experience they have, the more likely they are to visit again.
Create a mission statement.
Assess policies such as overdue fines and limits on the number of books that students may borrow.
group students by what color they are wearing, their birthdays, or the alphabet.
Be inclusive and take everyone into account to make sure all feel welcome, and they’ll come to think of the library as a refuge.
Topics you may want to include are a mission statement, library rules and policies, and an email address and other contact information. Include links to digital resources (online catalog, databases, ebooks), a research handbook, pages for school projects or pathfinders, links to the public library and other community organizations, and screencast tutorials. Share weekly or monthly news, favorite apps and web tools, makerspace information, book recommendations and trailers, and links to author tutorials.
As an incentive to return books on time, distribute punch cards to your students. When your students have a designated number of punches, stickers, or stamps, give them a small prize.
Gamify classroom management with ClassDojo or Classcraft so that your students take ownership of their behaviors and see a correlation between their choices and their successes.
Create a moment for your students by establishing a milestone ritual in your library. When your students ask you to sign their yearbooks, ask them to leave their mark on the library...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Your goal is to promote the library and make it more user-friendly for your learning community-not to adhere to old rules.
Some families haven’t developed meaningful connections with library culture, and part of the problem is that they can’t get to the library within the restricted traditional hours.
Work with your administration so you can offer extended hours one day each month for those families to visit your library. Offer these hours during conference days or meetings, when parents will be visiting the school anyway. During this time, provide opportunities for students and their families to use the computers and check out books. Students can also use that time to teach technology skills to the adults in their families.
Create a family collection of resources about parenting, career exploration, and college information, and host special family game nights and parent-child book clubs.
Give all of those bags you receive during conferences to your students, so they can carry their treasures home. Open the library once or twice during the summer so your students can exchange their books. You’ll be reaching students you were never able to reach before, just by bending a few of the old-fashioned rules.
It’s more important to get readers to return, not the books to return.
The library is for everyone, and if the student population is not interested in the library, it is a failing school program.
It is a school librarian’s mission to shatter the idea that the library is only for a small portion of the student population.
Libraries need to be places where all students can explore their interests.
As librarians, we must create a connection between content and application, and create it for all students. Libraries must not be collections or archives, but dynamic places where people can interact, communicate, and cooperate. Every child has a right to experience opportunities to build up his or her strengths and develop skills to manage weaknesses. Create a culture of making to support all your students in meeting their learning standards and becoming lifelong learners.
Libratory
We need to offer our students the resources and time to experience hands-on learning . . . The best place and time for that is in the largest classroom on campus: the library.
“play is the answer to how anything new comes about.”
The Maker Movement is not a trend, and hands-on learning does not replace literature and information literacy skills. It does, however, add an extra level to learning, and that level is one that students will embrace. By building a culture of making, librarians can create programs that appeal to all youth.
Bring in recyclable materials from home, such as cardboard tubes, newspapers, and bottle caps. Use these as examples of resourcefulness, sustainability, and thrift, and ask your students to bring stuff as well, to help create the library makerspace with you. Purchase consumable materials and invest in a few sturdy tools, such as Klever Kutter box cutters, Makedo cardboard building components, ZipSnip cordless cutters, Ryobi battery-operated glue guns, battery chargers and rechargeable batteries, and scissors. Include resources that represent all students, including construction paper, crayons,
...more
Some students don’t have cheerleaders, so be their pep squad.
Design “Maker Menus” of apps and websites
Invite the experts. Don’t wait for the annual Career Day to invite an expert into your library.
