Listen. Connect. Empower.

Community celebrations are some of my favorite units to teach in our library. There is something special about bringing people together over the common language of books/story and I am thrilled to teach in a like-minded community.  Books purchased for our Book Feast Community Read This year's community read is entitled A Book Feast: Bridging Cultures and Building Community with the Common Language of Food . This celebration is a collaboration between the town's public library and an incredibly generous group called DLIT - the Dedham Library Innovation Team, an amazing group of folks who support vibrant libraries in our town's public and school libraries.   A selection of books around the theme of food and community are being read in our town (see the list of books here ). Our school libraries received grant money to help us participate in this community celebration and with a selection of books and model magic, I prepared several weeks of reading, thinking, and creating ar...

With April quickly approaching I began to think about our poetry collection which currently does a lot of sitting on the shelves.  Appalling circ stats (see below) proved to me that even during a month when poetry is highlighted, these books still sit on the shelves.  It is time to do something about this situation.   Why aren't students picking up poetry books?  Every year poetry can be found in every nook and cranny of the library.  Some years I hang poetry all over the school.  We read and write our own poetry during library class.  Clearly, these efforts aren't doing the job.  The moral of the story - my students aren't connecting with the material.  Could this be the very root of the problem?   My school has a very diverse population.  Diverse characters are represented in .07% of our poetry books.  Could this be the missing piece to the puzzle?  I decided it was time to find out.  My goal M...