Happy Movember!

In celebration of Movember, a movement in which men grow mustaches to draw awareness to men's health issues, I decided to do a fun book display. This originally was a Pinterest find several years ago, but I had never found the right moment to put it together. Movember seemed like a perfect excuse to put mustaches on everything! My favorite cover is the one of Marley with a mustache.

To Kill a Mockingbird Intro

I had the opportunity to introduce To Kill a Mockingbird to a group a freshmen today. Influenced by a Teaching with Primary Sources workshop I took in the Summer of 2014 at Waynesburg University, I decided to check into some  photographic primary sources that reflect the South in the 1930s. The Library of Congress has a whole unit posted on To Kill a Mockingbird, but I wanted to craft one, isolated historical lesson. I was able to use the photograph collections posted in the LoC unit, which saved me a lot of time. I started the lesson with a review of primary and secondary sources. After defining the terms and reviewing some examples, we had a discussion on how a source can be both a primary and a secondary source at the same time! After discussing primary and secondary sources, students participated in a "Zoom In" activity to practice photograph analysis. Using the prompts on the LoC's Primary Source Analysis Tool, students were able to observe, reflect and question each piece of the photograph that I unveiled. After analyzing the photograph together, students had the opportunity to analyze a photograph independently, writing down their observations, reflections and questions. Students were sitting at tables with a group, and after a short period of time, they could discuss amongst themselves what all of their photos might have in common, how they were different, and how they might reflect some of the themes in To Kill a Mockingbird. To conclude, students were asked to hypothesize what some of the themes may be in the novel based on today's primary source activities. I have attached a link to my lesson plan, which includes materials for the lesson. I was excited to use the resources that I had learned about at TPS, and I look forward to executing more lessons using the Library of Congress digital collection.

Library Displays: Banned Books Week

Librarians tend to make a lot of displays, even at the secondary level! I like to document the displays that I've done in part so that I could recreate them in the future, but also so that I can demonstrate the book promotions that I've tried.

Some of the most elaborate displays I create annually for our high school library are for Banned Books Week. I email teachers and ask if they would like me to teach a lesson to their students on censorship or on book banning. This usually results in teaching lessons to several classes during Banned Books week. Often, one or two teachers will email later in the year about teaching a censorship lesson that fits into a unit that they are working on, citing my BBW email.

One year, I created a display outside of the library doors, and I covered the display case with papers that very crudely said "censored." When I removed the papers on the first day of Banned Books Week, information about banned books was revealed.

Have fun with Banned Books Week! Teenagers tend to be fascinated and surprised by the books included on the banned books lists published by ALA, and they love to talk about censorship.

SLOs

PA School Librarians have been discussing SLOs on our listerv for some time now. Through our online conversations, I learned that Westmoreland County offers a step-by-step guide to writing SLOs. The Model Curriculum also provides some excellent language that could transfer well into SLOs. These resources could be helpful for all PA educators, not just teacher librarians!