School Library Musings: Wait–You Can Do That?

When the showy pink Amaryllis belladonna flowers (or as they’re known colloquially, naked lady lilies) are in full bloom along the roadsides throughout Sonoma County, California, we know that summer is winding down and the new school year is just around the corner. Parents are thinking about the return to fall schedules, custodians are shining up the buildings, and teachers are already back at work putting up bulletin boards, reorganizing furniture, creating class lists, and planning first-day lessons.

But wait—someone else is also there, often unrecognized, but equally hard at work behind the scenes to make your students’ school experience a rich and meaningful one. This would be, of course, your school librarian. We recommend heading straight to the library without delay to see what’s new and what lies ahead for students there in the upcoming year.

School libraries from TK through high school have moved well beyond the weekly read-aloud, book check-out, and reference-shelf research routines of the past. Those weekly library visits that most elementary and many secondary schools provide are far more complex, starting with orienting new students and reacquainting returning students to library procedures. Teachers: Considering what possibilities they offer, don’t miss signing your classes up for those visits!

Physically, most school libraries now have a lot more on the shelves than books: art carts, puzzles and game tables, makerspaces, literature-related stuffies and puppets, rotating displays of new books and themed books, and tons of how-to books, all to entice readers at all levels. 

And programs? Librarians are offering book clubs for middle-grade students, training for volunteers and student library assistants, and professional development for teachers to learn how to use and incorporate the reference databases available to every school in California through the state library—for free! (Other states offer these kinds of resources also; check them out through your school, public library, or the state library website.) Need resources for classroom research projects? Talk to your library staff. If they don’t have the material your students need, they will help you track it down.

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If you are lucky (and your local school administrators are savvy), your school has a teacher-librarian (TL) on staff. These TLs not only collaborate with faculty members to support the curriculum, but they also have their own articulated information literacy curriculum that begins with how to care for and choose books. It then gradually moves into the organizational structure of a library: How do you find a book you want? How do you use the catalog? How is information organized?

But wait! There’s more! Check out more of the many wondrous things that teacher-librarians have been known to offer their communities:

• An active website, where staff might post targeted tiles or other informational services, along with access to the library catalog. Most school library websites offer links to resources, provide themed booklists, share book-related community events, and more. (Teachers: Ask your students to place that website link front and center on their laptops or devices, bookmarked for easy access. You will find it indispensable. And parents: Check it out for yourselves and see the amazing resources available to help your child navigate the world of information.)

• Lunchtime-targeted activities that include “brown bag” lunch speakers, fun challenges (see the marshmallow challenge), small-group games such as jigsaw or crossword puzzles, and weekly “Lunch Bunch” student volunteers who help with library tasks such as shelving, cleaning books, and making displays. (Laurie’s Lunch Bunch chose to practice and perform Readers Theater skits every year!)

• Supplies for purchase or borrowing, including coin boxes with inexpensive pencils and pens, as well as general supplies on hand for in-library use.

• After-school homework clubs, reading nooks, or even interactive game rooms.

Teachers naturally receive special attention from library staff. You don’t need a large classroom library of your own—borrow from your school library! Ask for a cart filled with books of all kinds: books related to your classroom unit or a rotating set of “choose your own” titles for recreational reading. This way, even without scheduled visits to the school library, your students have in-class access to a wide variety of always-changing books, keeping that interest high! Your TL can create bulletin boards or adjunct games related to a specific classroom focus to continue the classroom conversation when students visit the library.

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Do you have a lesson that requires more materials than are available in your school? Your librarian can reach out to local resources to augment a short-term study or order materials from the public library, other nearby schools, or local colleges. They can also check out tech equipment to classrooms, such as video cameras, digital cameras, digital voice recorders, and other creative technology — then teach students how to use that equipment. Better yet, your TL can coteach a tech primer with you, so students are both more efficient and more creative in using these tools in the narratives they are trying to tell.

In fact, teacher-librarians are the perfect collaborators. Ask them for help providing skills-based lessons specifically for GATE, EL, and special ed students. Teaching note-taking skills, internet use, web page evaluation, and how to use a library are all in the TL wheelhouse; coteach with them in the classroom! Work with them to integrate technology into your own lessons!

One of Connie’s favorite units was coteaching with a science teacher on a project to identify, then create, propaganda-directed commercials. The students never realized they were learning important information literacy skills while making commercials; they still tell her years later, when they run into her in the grocery store, that that unit was their all-time favorite one in school.

And of course, at all levels, library staff are constantly purchasing new reading material to entice students to explore new genres and different ways to access literature. So stop by your school library while the year is just starting and take advantage of all it has to offer. School libraries (and the librarians who run them) really do rock!

Visit www.everylibrary.org to learn more about our work on behalf of libraries. 

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