No Shhing Here

One of my personal goals for this school year is to increase student voice in our library program. I have some great mentors in this area (Hello, Sue Kowalski!), but it's not my personal strength. I know it's super-valuable, as it provides students with a sense of ownership and increases engagement, but it's not been as high a priority as it should be.  So, for my first targeted attempt of increasing student voice this year, I built a "Your Book Picks" display. To kick things off, our library helpers all recommended their favorite books.  But I built the display so it's constantly evolving and other students can add their favorites at any time. They simply grab a "thumbs-up" tag from the jar, write their name on it, and then stick it on their favorite book, adding it to the display.  Want to create this display for yourself? Here's a link to a PDF where you can download the materials . I just printed the thumbs on cardstock and then laminated th...

Hands down, lateral reading is my FAVORITE strategy for evaluating sources. It's concise, it's super practical, and it's accurate. It can be used for websites AND social media sources. It's also the strategy endorsed by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) in their Online Civic Reasoning framework. Here's a link to their collection of lessons for teaching lateral reading . There's also a Crash Course video  on YouTube introducing the skill. To apply lateral reading,  you Google the name of a source, then look at the results to see what OTHER sources have to say about your original source. It's called lateral reading because, instead of reading vertically (scrolling down the original website), you open new tabs in your browser to see what other sources say (reading laterally across your browser).  Once you spend some time with lateral reading, it becomes a really organic process, but I've found that students need distinct steps when they're fir...

This is my go-to bulletin board for January: Happy New Beginnings. It's interactive - students read the first line, guess what book it's from, then lift the flap to check their guess. Here's a list of the first lines I used, and their corresponding books: It was a pleasure to burn. (Fahrenheit 451) There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. ( Holes ) The best time to talk to ghosts is just before the sun comes up. ( Chains ) We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck. ( Feed ) The early morning sky was the color of cat vomit.  ( Imposters ) When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it's never good news. ( Stormbreaker ) Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that she would kill her true love. ( The Raven Boys ) The demon exploded in a shower of ichor and guts. ( Clockwork Angel ) My mother was raised on fairy tales, but I was raised on highways. ( The Hazel Wood ) Depending on who—sorry, whom—you ask, I may have kille...

Ever noticed, during group discussions, that students are really good at sharing their opinion, but then it's a massive struggle to build the conversation from there? I've slowly discovered that we have to teach students about the RANGE of ways they can contribute to a discussion.  For example, during a conversation, participants can add to the discussion in any of these ways: Add a new idea Challenge or disagree with what's been said Ask a clarifying question Build on someone else's idea Offer evidence to support an idea or a challenge To support this, I created a "card game."  Here's what all 14 cards look like: Here are the basic rules we've used to play -- but feel free to change them up. We also let the kids play rounds where they made up their own rules - this was successful, too!  If you're looking for a video version of the rules,  watch this TikTok . Number of Players: This works best with teams of 4, but will also work with 3-5 players. M...