Weekly Reading

Into The Wilderness by Sarah Donati  is a book I could't put down. A historical novel series  begins in the 1790's . Elizabeth Middletown, an educated spinster of 29, comes from England to join her Father in upstate NY. She wants to be a teacher  to the children living in the area. Her Father wants her to marry Dr. Richard Todd,

 Elizabeth has no intention of marrying anyone. But she is drawn to Nathaniel, a backwoodsman, son of Hawkeye ( Hero of the The Last of the Mochicans)

  Nathaniel's people want to buy back Hidden Wolf mountain  from her Father's property. Elizabeth will inherit  the mountain as part of her wedding gift.

 The novel is  full of action, adventure, romance, and family life in that time period. NOw I can wait to get the next in the series- there are 6 in all.

Smithsonian Learning Lab

Smithsonian Learning Lab is a free resources of digital resources. There are more than a million images, recordings, and texts for use by students and teachers, or anyone who wants to investigate digital sources.   The SLL is designed for discovery, creativity and  sharing. There are more than one million images, recordings, and texts. Search results display pictures that you can click on.  you can add notes, tag questions , save and share.

The learning lab helps build critical skills by having students  select , organizing and create new resources.  Enter a subject that interest you  in the search bar. Keywords can be from broad to specific/ Search results in an image grid but can also be changed to a list view.
There are resources and learning lab collections tabs at the top.  resources can be individual or a group. A curated group of resources will be a collection or resources.

  There are icons to help you distinguish between images, video, audio, and text, There are also learning resources( lessons , games, interactive online exhibition websites.
  users can collect resources, save them to favorites and also share resources with co- workers and colleagues.

https://learninglab.si.edu/

Personal Professional Growth

  At the  Summer Institute , we were given a continuum of school Librarian competencies, This rubric is for self growth to help up develop professionally. The competencies are from AASL and PSELS ( Professional Standards for Educational Leaders)

 Out of the 11 competencies I am going to work on  #1 first- which is Mission, Vision and Core Values. Being ion the middle school and the state of librarianship  with the strong digital aspect I will have to ponder before setting my mission and vision.  I have a small budget so that will be limiting as far as the digital/maker space aspect.

  Do you have mission or vision , or core values. I am struggling with this so if any one can comment please please do!

Setting Library Goals For a New Year

   It’s the first day of school   and time to set a few goals for the upcoming school year! After our Future Read Conference I have to decide what goals I want to pursue. I am thinking of two that are most important.

    One is continuing to build instructional partnerships with more teachers this year. Last year I had quite a few collaborative projects, and I am hoping this year to have those same teachers and then add several more that I did not get to work with last year.

  Another goal that I want to pursue is to become more proficient at a few key new technologies. The specific ones I have not decided on yet, but I am thinking of Symbaloo or Buncee . Those are a few of the ones Shannon McClintock Miller showed us at our conference.

   Do you have goals for the year? What are they? Share with us in the comment section please!

New School Year!

 Tomorrow is our first day- conference day  with staff. It will be an interesting year. Our assistant superintendent retired the end of June and we have a new  young  assistant superintend  Our superintendent retired in the middle of the summer  so now we have an intern . So we will see how that goes.
  My principal is away til next week,so I guess our Assistant Principal will be in charge for tomorrow. I am hoping to get into the Library. I did go the other day and went through the mail and put as much as I could back in place from the cleaning over the summer.

  The first thing I will do is send emails regarding library orientation and possible  research help.

September Bulletin Boards

  Yes I know many of  you are back in school already and probably have your "Welcome back" bulletin boards already . We go  back the first week of September.
  I will put up something like the following:

Fall in Love with Reading

Leaf though a Good Book

Fall in love with  your library

Rake in a good read

Welcome Back - The books missed you!

All of these can be done with a simple background,  a tree, and some leaves!

Project Based learning- Why should we use it?

   Project Based Learning is the way most of the world works now. If you think about your life at home, and your life at work , you can see that we go through a variety of tasks and projects throughout each day. Each task requires that you learn new things and acquire new skills as you complete tasks.

   In real life , we don't spend several hours listening as authorities  in their subject area speak on and on. We  start with what we know and then we ask questions  about what we need to complete the task,

  The research shows that PBL is more effective than  the traditional lesson plan model. In Japan, Finland, Sweden and Denmark use this plan and believe it is the best way to learn. ( They score the highest on math and science tests.)

 The PBL teaching and learning approach  takes more time to plan. It also requires collaboration with other teachers.  And  it requires students have a set of skills that work with the process.
   This year, I am going to emphasize the PBL to my staff and hope to work with them to incorporate PBL into their lessons and curriculum, so I will be writing more about this as I do more research on the system.