Group items tagged

"Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States." 50 State Salute (Want your library to participate to represent Oregon?): http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/calendarofevents#50statesalute Virtual Read-Out: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/calendarofevents#virtualreadout Ideas and Resources (listed in the column on the left): http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/bannedbooksweek/ideasandresources BBW Promotional Items from ALA Store: http://www.alastore.ala.org/SearchResult.aspx?CategoryID=269

Banned Books Week is an annual event drawing attention to the concept of intellectual freedom and is celebrated during the last week of September. In 2011 ALA introduced Banned Websites Awareness Day to draw attention to problems Internet filtering can cause. For those who want to promote the event, the ALA Store has posters, bookmarks, t-shirts, and more. http://www.alastore.ala.org http://bannedbooksweek.org/

This list began in 2009 and is updated every summer. Former "best sites" are available in the archives. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/guidelinesandstandards/bestlist/bestwebsitespast.cfm

Every year, more than $82,000 is given away through ALSC's professional awards and grants, and scholarships. Awards and grants are listed here; for information about scholarships please click here.

YALSA offers webinars on various topics for YA librarians a few times a year. From this site you can learn about upcoming sessions and access archived ones.

Día is a nationally recognized initiative that emphasizes the importance of literacy for all children from all backgrounds. It is a daily commitment to linking children and their families to diverse books, languages and cultures. The common goals of all Día programming are to:

ALSC (ALA's Association for Library Service to Children) announced the redesign of the Great Web Sites for Kids site. Newly evaluated and accepted sites are added to the database three times a year. The committee also reviews all sites within the database twice a year to guarantee sites are still relevant, appropriate and accessible.

Great links for teachers.

"How are AASL's new learning standards, the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner, incorporated into the school library program? This publication from AASL takes an in-depth look at the strands of the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and the indicators within those strands." This book can be ILLed from the Oregon State Library: http://www.oregon.gov/OSL/LD/school/index.shtml#Requesting_Materials_from_OSL_.

"Standards for the 21st-Century Learner offer vision for teaching and learning to both guide and beckon our profession as education leaders. They will both shape the library program and serve as a tool for school librarians to use to shape the learning of students in the school."

The following pages include tables that help school librarians learn how the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and the Common Core Standards align. Notice the resources in the column on the left.

"Empowering Learners advances school library programs to meet the needs of the changing school library environment and is guided by the Standards for the 21st-Century Learner and Standards for the 21st-Century Learner in Action. It builds on a strong history of guidelines published to ensure that school library program planners go beyond the basics to provide goals, priorities, criteria, and general principles for establishing effective library programs." This book can be ILLed from the Oregon State Library: http://www.oregon.gov/OSL/LD/school/index.shtml#Requesting_Materials_from_OSL_.

"Welcome to the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) Standards for the 21st-Century Learner Lesson Plan Database, a tool to support school librarians and other educators in teaching the essential learning skills defined in the AASL Standards for the 21st-Century Learner." You can both utilize and contribute lesson plans. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/guidelinesandstandards/lessonplandatabase/lessonplandb.cfm

I can see amazing potential here for amazing resources!

"One of the realities some school librarians face in their jobs is pressure by administrators and classroom teachers to label and arrange library collections according to reading levels. Student browsing behaviors can be profoundly altered with the addition of external reading level labels. ..." Do you agree or disagree?

Let me tell you about our Floor-etry. First, floor-etry is a poem on the floor. That's it. It's simple and vastly influential in the process of creating an early literacy environment.  We here at the Allen County Public Library  got the idea from Saroj Ghoting's website for early literacy. In a presentation put together by Dana Bjerke, Joanna Redman and  Kelly Wussow from the Hennepin County Library, you can flip through different slides and see inspiring ideas that make words accessible to even the littlest of patrons. We thought, "We can do that!"

And we did! We wrote a poem that is actually just a string of similes so the reader can start anywhere in the circle and the poem makes sense. We typed it up in HUGE, easy to read font, printed it out on bright paper and cut out the words. After cutting out the words, we laminated each one and added Velcro to the back for a temporary hold. We placed the poem in the front of our department in the shape of a (yellow) sun!

Hope that you follow John at his blog page, twitter is even better, see this posting for inspiration.

We recently put up a book display that has books flying off of the shelves! Flying, I tell you! It seems that as soon as we fill it up, it is empty again.

"The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) presents 30 Second Thought Leadership: Insights from Leaders in the School Library Community, a new video podcast series delivering brief and practical advice from respected school library leaders on important questions about school libraries today and in the future."

Most nominations for AASL awards and grants are due in January or February.