by Shannon Betts, LMS
My daughter’s high school library has a teeny-tiny fiction collection. I mean teeny tiny. On a recent orientation visit, I found I could traverse the entire area in 8 steps from the A authors to the Zs. I took in the rest of the room, with its soaring arches, flexible...
by Shannon Betts, LMS
How do you begin researching a new topic? Do you reach for your phone, type in a couple of words and hope for the best? As tempting and convenient it is to jump right into the water and “Google it”, there are benefits for students to start research in a library...
by Shannon Betts, LMS
Sometimes it’s hard to be both a parent and a teacher. I feel conflicted, especially during conference times for our own two kids. In this post, I describe the literacy partnership that we began 13 years ago, way before our first parent-teacher conference with Mr. Z....
by Shannon Betts, LMS
Researching Author Bias in the Library Media Center: The Inquiry The class of twenty-two sixth graders silently reads the text displayed on the Smart board. The silence grows longer as they continue to examine the web page of two short paragraphs. One boy looks at the...
by Shannon Betts, LMS
Empower families with a community family literacy center embedded in a school library… Schools are in the midst of great change, and librarians are searching for niches in which they can serve the information and social needs of communities. Most educators, such as...
by Shannon Betts, LMS
Like many Teaching Librarians across the country, the librarian position in my school had been reduced to part-time before I came to the school. I taught a fixed schedule for grades 1-3 and a flexible, project-based schedule for grades 4 and 5. Managing to fit in all...