No Shhing Here

Our January library displays are up. Our "Healthy Apps" Display for the month of January In our school, January is Wellness Month. To celebrate, the library hosts WiiFit Fridays, where students can play WiiSports or Just Dance! during study hall and lunch. (If you squint, you can just make out the Wii action in the background of the above photo.) (Imagine this is rotated 90 degrees) Fooducate pillar in the library.  In addition to our Wii activities, we have a display on Healthy Apps.   Fooducate , a fantastic app that helps you make healthier food choices, is totally worth checking out if you're unfamiliar with it. Above: Our "grocery store" in the library. We installed the app on our library iPads and iPods, and students used it to scan barcodes on all kinds of different food. We definitely feel like we're running a grocery store with all these items on our shelves! The app gives each food a letter grade and provides suggestions for he...

Have you heard about The 2012 Project? The Teen Librarian's Toolbox is spearheading this fantastic endeavor.  The goal is to promote the idea that teens LOVE libraries. To demonstrate this visually, TLT is going to collect 2012 photos of teens using libraries. Librarians and teens are asked to tweet their photos to @TLT16 or post them to the TLT Facebook wall.  To reach this goal, TLT needs six photos a day. Get snapping!

For all my problems with the Common Core standards, I'm loving their emphasis on nonfiction. My English teachers weren't originally feeling the romance, but now some of them are ready to flirt with the idea that nonfiction can be fantastic and engaging.  A nonfiction display for the unit Today, for the first time, we had classes in the library for a nonfiction book selection. Because these kids have never picked a nonfiction book "for fun," they needed a little instruction in what to look for. I invented arbitrary nonfiction categories for my collection: reference books, research books, coffee table books, biographies, and literary/narrative nonfiction, and provided examples from each category. The kids were asked to choose books that were either biographies or literary/narrative nonfiction. What nonfiction topics do 14-year-olds gravitate towards? Ghosts Sports stories (think the Blind Side ) Memoirs (esp. drug addiction stories) Nonfiction books def...