Our G6 Language & Literature classes have just started a unit on "Unlikely Heroes" and I must admit I've been having an amazing time finding some fantastic new biographies and memoirs to entice them into reading this genre and keeping an interest in the lives of people who may not always make the headlines, or … Continue reading Unlikely new nonfiction
Continuing in my series of "no excuses" rants, I'm moving onto a biggie. Facebook. Except my rant isn't so much against FB - everyone has done a better and more eloquent version of it in one form or another from one viewpoint or another. It's more a rant against us librarians as consumers of FB … Continue reading No excuses: Facebook
It's a public holiday today, so instead of doing what I should be doing (making questions for the Readers' Cup), I've been ordering replacement FollettBound books - for the ones that have fallen apart and are now out of print. Easier said than done. There's a reason (some) books go out of print. And junior … Continue reading Junior fiction – what’s hot and what’s not
This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while. A long while. I'm a member of quite a few librarian and school librarian groups and invariably, at least once a month, a question will pop up asking for a "killer" book. Either one that is perfect for reluctant readers, or one that … Continue reading It’s not (just) the book
And it's not the usual stuff about being poor misunderstood under-utilized bits of the school / community. No, the frustration goes much much further. It's about how information, knowledge, books, data, well just about anything is NOT being tagged and catalogued and made generally searchable, available. What prompted this? Well my inbox. I subscribe to … Continue reading Frustrations of a librarian
I've been asked to be on a panel at the AFCC to chat about "Books Teachers Wish Authors Would Write" from a teacher / librarian perspective. So I put the question out on one of my teacher-librarian networks (an international one) and these were the responses I received: World war 2 in Asia- novel for … Continue reading Books I wish would be published
Reading "Small Things" and discussing it with colleagues and friends, combined with the Sinna Man video has set me off on a train of thought of what the "unmentionables" in children's literature - or more specific, picture books are. Yes, some Europeans are doing some things, but it doesn't yet seem to be in the … Continue reading The unmentionables
It's been a tough few weeks, and this morning I was reminded just what it's all about. I was reading "All the lost things" by Kelly Canby to a Grade 2 class, and at the end, one little girl said "It's so beautiful I want to cry" at which point I also wanted to plink … Continue reading It’s so beautiful I want to cry …
This is a tough one. The library I'm with at school hasn't jumped on board. And all for very good reasons. Personally though, in my home library I've been embracing audio books ever since my kids were very small - (about 10 years ago) when we were living in Spain and I had a long … Continue reading Day 2: ebooks & audiobooks
Informative Flights - Musings of a Teacher Librarian 