Freshman Library Orientation: A New Approach for a New School Year

For the last couple of years, I have made a concerted effort to make freshman library orientation more engaging and more meaningful for our first-time high school library-goers. I gradually moved away from the dreaded rules lecture to half rules/half scavenger hunt, and then finally this year I may have hit the winning combination. I had heard of Aurasma before, but I had never really envisioned much of a use for it at the high school level. After exploring some ideas of how to create a Pokemon Go inspired library scavenger hunt, I came across several ideas for incorporating Aurasma into a library orientation. I decided to ditch Pokemon Go (that was SO 2016 anyway) and opted for a simpler way of introducing students to their high school library.

To start, I watched this very brief  Step-By-Step instructional video on how to create an Aura. I then walked around the library to determine the couple of items and places I most wanted students to know about on their first visit here. I created a handout where group members could record their responses to the scavenger hunt.

I was also able to get my upperclassmen student library aides involved, which was helpful. I recorded a couple of students talking about certain aspects of the library. I use freshman library orientation to shamelessly promote our reading team to interested freshmen, and it was just fantastic to have upperclassmen explain to the freshmen that it's a really fun and welcoming club!

After freshmen completed the scavenger hunt, I was able to intertwine policies and procedures into our discussion of the scavenger hunt answers. This approach was pretty painless and fairly well-received. When we were done discussing the answers to the activity, I took students on a tour of our online resources. I directed students to the "Policies and Procedures" page of our website first to finish talking about anything important that didn't fit into our previous discussion, and then instructed students on how to log into our databases and ebooks. Overall, the lesson was engaging and it also hit upon everything I needed students to walk away knowing about the library. Next year, I hope to have a little bit more time to make my Auras more fun (they were pretty bare-bones this year), but overall I highly recommend this method of library orientation!