book.and.bloom

I’ve enjoyed mulling over the question of how best I can respond to the needs of the staff. It seems to me that this question has two realities which should be addressed before I start proposing initiatives. The first is the reality of COVID. As with all libraries and schools across Canada, COVID has fundamentally changed our roles this year and the roles of our co-workers. In my Winnipeg school division, teachers are now teaching 2 classrooms of students at once using Microsoft Teams to communicate between the two spaces and to deliver content. Until January, these same teachers were also teaching students who opted to learn from home as well as those in the two classroom spaces. Their professional needs have certainly looked different this year than in the past.   Equally relevant is the fact that I am new to the role of teacher librarian and am experience a very steep learning curve as I am familiarizing myself with our equipment and school technology. My predecessor had a reput...

  Twitter Although it gets a bad rap, Twitter is a great space in which people can exchange ideas. Many people whom I follow are very generous with this professional life-journeys, their teaching successes and failures, and often offer materials (powerpoints, word documents, reading lists) for free. These gems enhance my teaching, challenge my thinking and provide some very appreciated pre-organized lessons for me to implement. Some of my favourite teachers to follow are Pernille Ripp (@pernilleripp), Jess Lifshitz (@Jess5th), Haley Lewis (@misslewis313), Brandi Bartok (@Brandi_Edu), and Ellen Bees (@EllenBees). Although many people from this list teach in the USA, most of their ideas are universal and I have happily implemented suggestions such as the 40 Book Challenge, Book Speed Dating and Global Read Aloud in my classrooms. I also follow authors. Some use twitter to solely promote their books, but others such as these really interact with their fans and offer supplemental acti...

To say that this has been an abnormal year is quite an understatement. Although I started September as a teacher librarian, I have been redeployed to a grade 1 and grade 2 classroom, I have had 3 new schedules so far and work at two schools (so double all of that!). Since this is the only experience I have had as a teacher librarian, I have decided early on to make the best of this experience and continue to try my best to add value to my school through my reduced role as teacher librarian. I have had to let a lot of my ideas go to “the graveyard of good ideas” due to COVID restrictions, but I am never-the-less proud of the programs I have managed to kick-start at my school and plan to resurrect the ones I couldn't implement this year in future years.  MYRCA:  The first program I would like to highlight is the MYRCA  reading challenge. Manitoba Young Readers Choice Award invites young readers to participate in choosing a MYRCA winner every year by voting for their fa...

  Resource #1: https://code.org Description: This website offeres pre-made, interactive, scaffolded lessons for students to follow and gain computer and coding skills. These lessons start at a pre-reader level and go right to highschool level.  Impression: I could see how this website would be a great resource for a teacher introducing coding to his/her students. The prescribed lessons are a bit dry but the variety of games ready for students to apply block coding skills to are vast and appealing. There is something there to meet any topic of interest the students may have. This is a solid website resource and something I plan to incorporate into my teaching of coding. Resource #2: Minecraft Teacher Guide Description: This resource is an education guide with embedded links which explain how to teach with Minecraft in the classroom. Includes videos, FAQs, outcomes, answer keys  and adaptations for remote learning. Impression: This resource has the aim to teach not only abo...

I have had a lot of success this week in my search for resources about coding in the early elementary classroom. My initial search tactic was to start with a general Google search of “coding” to get an idea of what was out there. I quickly learned that there was a lot out there on this topic! Seeing as I am teaching in a grade 1 and grade 2 classrooms during Manitoba’s code orange, I altered my search to “teaching coding elementary” and found some more relevant results. In fact, sifting through resources to see which will best fit my context seems to be the biggest challenge with the topic I’ve selected!  Retrieved on January 31, 2021 from https://svanews.com/2016/07/19/how-to-make-search-more-efficient-searching-on-google-tips/ Sites varied in quality and I found many which hosted lists of ideas ( such as this example ) but offered little to no specific advice. These were not very helpful as they had a dizzying amount of imbedded links  and simply lead me down an in...

To start this blog, I began by brainstorming words that came to mind when I thought of Information Literacy. I re-read sections of  Leading Learning: Standards of Practice for School Library Learning Commons in  Canada to remind myself of some of the skills needed for 21 st  century learners. I also included the skills identified from the   National Council of Teachers of English (NTCE) 21st Century Literacies as outlined by Richardson’s book  Why School  in chapter 5. By this time, my list was over 120 words long and I was no closer to identifying major themes of interest for future pursuit.  To aid me in making sense of this long list, I entered the word list that I had compiled into a word cloud generator. Although there are many available, I made use of worditout.com since it was free and fairly user-friendly, while allowing for some control over text, direction, colour and word emphasis. I’ve included the image below. As you can see the main word...

Introduction   When talking to my own children, I remind them that within my life's memory,  I would drive to the bank to access my money, drive to a store to buy records and CDs, rent movies at a store dedicated solely to that purpose. And I’m only 37 years old! The pace of technological advancement has accelerated and I can only imagine the range of change the students of today will experience in their lifetimes.   The internet has opened the world to possibilities unheard of back in the 1980s. I can now order groceries, liquor, furniture, toys and other items to be delivered directly to my home through my smartphone. I can play cards online with people I’ve never met, I can read books on line which define unfamiliar words for me as I read, I can find my soulmate on a dating site, a house on Kijiji, or a roommate on Facebook market.     According to Statistics Canada, as of 2018, “nearly 84% of Internet users [are] buying goods or services online” (2019)....