School's Back in Session

The second week of school is well underway and I am back in the library! It was an interesting spring as I prepared to teach social studies this fall, but the middle school librarian that was bumping me is teaching 4th grade instead. While it's sad that our middle schools have no credentialed librarian, I am grateful to have my job. I know I will feel the impact next year when our 9th graders enter with little or no prior library instruction.

The new year has started with some exciting initiatives. We have had a schoolwide SSR program that was being implemented in a haphazard fashion. This year, we are trying to reinvigorate the program as we take on literacy as a schoolwide focus area (formative assessment and differentiation are our other areas of focus). To that end, our English department lead and I met over the summer to put together a structured component one day a week. 56 teachers out of 120 volunteered to participate in this structured reading. Each week they receive a different reading activity to do with their students. The first two weeks were read-alouds from Gary Soto and Funny in Farzi. Next week is a cloze activity created from a Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul book. So far feedback has been positive and I had a senior checking out a library book tell me "they're taking SSR seriously". I've booked multiple classes in for Book Talks and checked out 282 books in the first week of school.

I'm also doing a library orientation with my freshman English teachers. Last year, two teachers asked for the activity. So far this year six teachers are bringing their students. I do a "scavenger hunt" type activity, but each component involves a resource that they will need to use during their time at the school. For example, our seniors have a word etymology project that requires the Oxford English Dictionary. On the scavenger hunt, students have to locate the book and find a word as a preview of what's to come down the line. They use the library database to look up some simple country data so they see it before they come in for formal research with their history classes. The students have been engaged.

Ok, enough bragging for now. It's only the second week...there may be more to come.