Tales from a Loud Librarian

On Friday, I began teaching lessons on how to conduct good research. This is a yearly event where I spend lots of time with all the middle school students helping them to prepare for writing a paper for the social studies fair. This year, the students do not have to do a full blown social studies fair project, but all students are required to write a paper.They cannot get honors' credit for social studies without writing a research paper. Several years ago, the English department and I decided that we wanted the students to write quality papers for this project. If that was going to happen, then the papers needed to be started in English class.We have really developed a method for teaching research that we are proud of. It is truly collaborative. Since the paper does not have to be as long as in past years (social studies fair had length requirements), we have scaled  back the paper to make it more age appropriate. To make the process more manageable for teachers and students, th...

I can't believe how frantic it can get in a school library. You might think of libraries as the calm oases in the sea of children who move in out of classrooms and down the halls of a school, but the library at PFTSTA is often so busy that my head is spinning by the end of the day.  We are currently in the midst of getting the middle school students ready to write the research paper for the annual  social studies fair . That means I am teaching all the students about where they should look for resources and how to access and utilize those resources. I will also help them learn how to create citations for this paper, but we have not started our lessons on using Easybib yet.  Along with teaching classes most of the day, I was preparing for the annual Open House for prospective students. Once all the preparations were in place, then I actually had to return to school on Thursday evening and give my two minute spiel about the library almost 25 times as parents and st...