🌎 Holiday Traditions Around the World

With holiday break approaching and with a building focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, students could choose to attend a library advisory session featuring holiday traditions from around the world. In our time together, students accessed a one-pager that included galleries, a quiz, and an activity.

CLICK HERE to access the one-pager

Students could choose to access different galleries from the Travel Channel or Newsweek, both of them showcasing holiday traditions from a variety of locations around the globe. Students could also work individually or in groups to take a Google Earth holiday quiz that included geographic and cultural information. Finally, students could design or decorate their own holiday tree with an activity from Eric Curts and Control Alt Achieve.

More advisory activities to share next week!

Recognizing Native American Heritage Month

One of the ways we celebrate in November is with National Native American Heritage Month. Like with other monthly celebrations, students could choose to visit the library to access an interactive one-pager featuring related websites, videos, and activities. Students can visit Google Arts & Culture or Mesa Verde National Park, as well as learn about the Navajo Code Talkers or create a beaded design.

CLICK HERE to access the one-pager.

One of the items included on the one-pager comes from Sarah Wood and My Ed Tech World. The virtual exploration room related to Native American Heritage Month comes from her Symbaloo of virtual exploration rooms. A close-up of her room is below:

CLICK HERE to access

A shout-out to our Heartland AEA technology consultant Cathy Hines who shared this exploration room and a directory of the items linked in it. How great to be able to give students a bit of a preview before they began exploring the room and the rest of the one-pager!

Term 1 Statistics

Our term ended today, so it's time for some quick statistics about our first nine weeks of school! Thanks to Canva, it's easy to create colorful, detailed posters--like this one that highlights some of the things going on in the library since August:

Here's to the second term! More good things to come!

Wrapping up National Hispanic Heritage Month

September 15 - October 15 is traditionally celebrated as National Hispanic Heritage Month. In the past, library displays and advisory activities have helped introduce students to the people, culture, history, places, and more related to this month of recognition. (You can read an earlier blog post HERE.) 

CLICK HERE to access the 1-pager.

Several books in the library feature Hispanic characters or are written by Hispanic authors--you can see a few of them below:

Want to know more about the books or find others that relate to National Hispanic Heritage Month? Check out this playlist of book trailers:

Hope to see you soon in the library--maybe even to check out one of the featured books here! :)

Reading and Book Memes

Today's advisory offering was inspired by other work students completed for a science teacher--memes! Students had access to a 1-pager with directions, and then the creating, fun, and laughing began!

Students visited a free meme generating website and started working from there. So much fun conversations about their reading and the books or characters they had in mind when creating their memes. Even some book recommendations among classmates!

A few examples that generated a few laughs:

Students often created several memes in the time we had together, and with so many clever examples, it was time to update the gallery wall display with their work. 

📚Fan Art

Today's offering in advisory was YA lit fan art, a joint endeavor with a colleague, and was one of the Wellness Wednesday choices students could choose to attend. After a brief Slides presentation to share examples of personal fan art and general ideas, students had time to choose from several things: explore examples online, share their own art with one another if they had it with them, and create.

Students were encouraged to look online for inspiration.

Some students even brought along their own sketch books.

Some students' work appears below, and many more pieces will be included along with these in a display featured near the bookshelves.

Behind the Circulation Desk

After a visit from a local public librarian, when she talked about services and programming related to our two local public libraries, students in Novels class visited the library for a presentation and activities related directly to their own school library. The presentation was called "Behind the Circulation Desk" and focused on book recommendations, book selection and purchasing, and book processing.

 

Part of the presentation included discussions about choosing books for the library using the criteria we librarians use. Considering descriptions and reviews from our vendor's website, students evaluated a new fiction release by a popular author, a series book, a poetry book, and an older fiction book. Each group of students shared whether or not they would include the title in the collection and defend their choices using the criteria we'd discussed.

As part of the book processing piece of the presentation, students themselves covered paperback books for the English department. Following a step-by-step process, students were able to independently cover trade paperbacks from a classroom set--learning a step in the school library process while helping one of their English teachers at the same time!