Multimedia in the Hub

My partner Kim, the 21st century digital learning specialist, and I, the library lady, are trying to find ways to be a resource to classroom teachers by enhancing their ongoing curriculum. After some brainstorming, we came up with an idea to have a multimedia day in the Learning Hub. Our guinea pig classes were the 4th grade as they are studying water in their science curriculum.

We kept it simple for everyone and had three rotations of 15 minutes a piece (in hindsight, we needed more time for each rotation). One rotation was exploring websites we had found that were level-appropriate and one was a reading time with all the book resources I pulled from the shelves. The last rotation was my favorite: a slideshow of water around the world, in various forms and using very thought-provoking pictures with only one or two words on the slide. Stopping every five slides or so to have a 'turn and talk' discussion about what they see is where we are going the next time.

Our hope is that this can become a more consistent supplement to the ongoing curriculum as a means of using our Hub as a continual resource. Fingers crossed!

FBA Poetry

Nye, Naomi Shihab. A. Maze Me. Greenwillow, 2005.
You know when you check a book out of the library and you keep putting off returning it so you can have just one more look at it? This is that book for me. Thankfully, I am the librarian, and so I can cheat a bit on overdues. Naomi's gorgeously illustrated book sat on my bedstand forever and was the perfect poetry collection to leaf through every now and then to find gem after gem of honest, tender, raw poetry geared for girls (but great for boys, too!). A brilliant addition to any classroom or bookshelf.

Here's a snippet of the magic:

Life is a tangle of
Twisting paths.
Some short.
Some long.
There are dead ends.
And there are choices.
And wrong turns,
And detours,
And yield signs,
And instruction booklets,
And star maps,
And happiness,
And loneliness.
And friends.
And sisters.
And love.
And poetry.

Life is a maze.
You are a maze.
Amazed.
And amazing.