Library Media Tech Talk

Since I started working as a school librarian, I've always found a way to have a book club. In this post, I'll talk about my current method for administering a book club. It has evolved a bit over the years. Since coming to Bethel Middle School this year I have adapted it for 6th and 7th grades in my current position. The students seem to really enjoy it. This year we have read two books in 4 separate clubs. In the fall we read The Girl in the Locked Room by Mary Downing Hahn. During the spring semester, we read Pax by Sara Pennypacker. Since we use a Scholastic Book Fair as our main fundraiser for the fall, I use some of the money to purchase book club books (usually from Scholastic). While we are reading a book, I generally have 3-4 book club meetings during lunch in the library. As long as students come to all the meetings and/ or participate in my Google Classroom discussions, they get to keep the book at no cost. I usually have around 10 students in each club. I have ...

It seems there is no end to the list of new books that are released by publishers each month. On top of being a literacy specialist, teacher librarians also must manage the facility and student visitors, collaborate, create programming, market library services, serve as school technology support, and many other duties. If you have found it a challenge to keep up with new books as a result of these numerous job tasks, I want to share a simple way that changed our practice in the school library last year. The Struggle I find it difficult to read as a result of the many daily tasks I experience as a teacher librarian. This is a fact I have worried about for several years. I've been working hard over the summer to read more, and I'm very proud to say that this will be a continuing priority for the new school year. The simple fact is that it is impossible to "sell" students on book titles if we can't speak about them with knowledge and passion! There is something...

There are always students ready to lead book club discussions When the library began having summer hours during the 2013-2014 school year, I decided to make book clubs available to students during the summer months as part of our library services. During that same school year, we had our first student led book clubs. We have discovered that there are always students willing to lead book clubs in the library. This will be the third summer we have held a club. We decided to read The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey. One of our upcoming juniors, Nathan, volunteered to lead discussion activities for three sessions. We started promoting this club during the last few weeks of school. Ten students signed up by the end of the school year. I used Remind to send text messages to book club members to help them remember the book club meeting dates and page assignments. One of our principals even sent out a phone message to all parents in grades 8-12 advertising the summer club. Nathan and I al...

It seems that our entire library staff (myself, Mrs. Misti Bell, Mr. Ray Borel, and Mrs. Peggy Schaeffer) are constantly asking, "what if?" We have had success with student led lunch programming and student led classroom collaborations over the past two years. At the first of this year, our big question was "What if we invited student leaders to present about the power of student led presentations with us at the annual Arkansas Association of Instructional Media Conference (AAIM)?" The more Mrs. Bell and I thought about it, the more we liked the possibility. Our administrators also thought it was a great idea! We decided to make this one of our professional goals for the 2014-2015 school year. It was difficult to decide which programs to highlight, but we finally decided on seven. We picked student led sessions on Linux, Show your Talent, Black History Month on Martin Luther King, Jr & Michael Jackson, 3D Printing , Teach The Teacher , Sophomore Shakespeare Da...