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Some great ideas providing themes that could be used with a Lego Club. "Lego Fun Friday is a twice-a-month feature.  Each time, we share photos from the building challenge and then announce the next challenge to take place in two weeks.  "

Printable Reading Bingo containing 24 reading challenges that will help you read more and have more fun with it.

"Tool discovery is often a challenge for teachers interested in finding ways to use technology that will change the way they and their students work. With so much going on in the classroom, many teachers don't have the time to test out various apps and find the perfect tool to meet their needs. Luckily, several tech-savvy librarians have been curating the apps their colleagues find useful and sharing the all-stars with one another through personal learning communities (PLC) and edWeb webinars."

"Project Information Literacy is a national study about early adults and their information-seeking behaviors, competencies, and the challenges they face when conducting research in the digital age. The large-scale and collaborative research initiative investigates how early adults from different college campuses conduct research for coursework and how they conduct "everyday research" for use in their daily lives"

Useful tips from a classroom teacher. "Using forms in Google docs lets anyone create forms quickly and share those forms via email, embed them into a webpage or blog. If you are a teacher, you can create formulas that allow you to have these forms graded in minutes. The formula part is a bit challenging, so I wrote this article to talk about how I recently created a final for one of my classes."

"Teachers who are looking to integrate comics and graphic novels into their regular classroom practice routinely face the issue of having colleagues who are very reluctant to do likewise. This is not surprising in and of itself, but you might not know what is actually behind the reluctance. Having talked to many educators on this very subject over the years, three facts stand out about these attitudes of resistance. Although we might think that most teachers who are reluctant to use visual narrative in the classroom simply believe that comics and graphic novels are unworthy of treatment, this only seems to be about the fourth or fifth most common response."

"Children learn through play and exploration. From floating sticks downstream to ducks in the tub, early lessons in how the world works come from play.  By building upon play, a mode of learning that is rooted in curiosity and joy, we can engage our students in a truly authentic way. For instance, a project involving electronics can be launched with a session with circuit boards, or wood working with a one-block challenge. Both of these activities originate from two of my favorite resources for exploration-based maker activities: the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium, and the Makerspace at the New York Hall of Science. "

How to teach text structures for better reading comprehension and improved retention. Teachers of history, science, and other subjects are now expected to weave literacy instruction into their teaching of content. But how should they do that? What are the most effective ways to help students learn to read challenging content-area texts? This article breaks down the research behind explicit teaching of text structures and includes a video that shows how to do it (Great for content-area literacy)

"Today's school library uses an increasing number of digital resources to supplement a print collection that is moving more toward fiction and literary non-fiction. Supplemental resources, including streaming video, online resources, subscription databases, audiobooks, e-books, and even games, round out the new collections. Despite the best efforts of even the hardest-working librarians in the best-funded libraries, there are many challenges to going digital." Links to free, full text and PDF versions

"It's up to teachers to guide students in choosing to uplift, teach, inform, challenge, and care for others with their messages versus break down others. Additionally, our students need guidance in realizing their self worth and seeing themselves as individuals in a digital world. They need to practice choosing what they feel is right as individuals versus going along with their peers for instant approval. These are ideas Shelly Terrell shared in a keynote speech"

Having the "same" text written for different levels of English comprehension can be a life-saver for a multi-level class of English Language Learners or for a teacher with a mainstream class that includes some students that are facing other challenges. They can be an important tool for differentiation. Listed here are a few sources where you can get these different versions other than creating them yourself.

The Great Book Swap Challenge

This article challenges the status quo which reveals that most schools are studying very few books by female authors and that there is an under representation by the media of reviewing books written by female authors. Aviva Tuffield argues that this gives women and men a distorted view of our society and contributes to unconscious bias again genuine equality.

"The Covid-19 crisis has meant that schools are having to maintain communications with parents and families in very challenges circumstances. Here are some EEF resources to help schools communicate with parents/carers, as well as resources schools can share with families to support home routines and valuable learning opportunities, such as shared reading."

"if we want to do data responsibly, we need to challenge some basic assumptions and highlight how some values conflict. What if your project will increase inequality and hurt the people you're trying to help?"

The Book Review has occasionally in the past, asked young authors about their biggest influences. For their 125th anniversary, they put the question to a new generation. A simple challenge was put to a group of writers under 40: Name the writer or writers who have most influenced your work and explain how. In the past, many of the US-based "authors contacted were just beginning their careers and they later became some of the most widely read and respected artists of their generation." As part of their 125th-anniversary celebration, the same question to writers of today. They are: Megha Majumdar, Tommy Orange, Alyssa Cole, Emma Cline, Yaa Gyasi, Ottessa Moshfegh, Gabriel Bump

A libguide set up to teach media literacy. Another resource that others may find helpful when trying to teach about challenges that the proliferation of Fake News brings.