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...

Building Windmills Our library class time has been dedicated to thinking about how we can make our community better. (See my previous posts ).  However, I was not done with  The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind  yet.  I was inspired by my colleague  Alice Johnson  to carry these ideas into our Makerspaces. I planned to have students participate in the "Windmill Challenge" and build their own windmills with everyday materials. I knew that I needed some dedicated time (and recess would not do it).  I also knew that extra hands would be needed.  I invited students to join me after school for an hour and enlisted in Alice's help to recruit High School students to help us.  11 elementary school students and 3 high school student "coaches" together created windmills.  We had a great afternoon of building and cooperative learning. Starting supplies Students started with supplies and a video about how to create a pinwheel So...

Our community is reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind  by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer as a One Book, One Community read. I was especially excited this year because the different formats enable my elementary school students to participate this year. We had been challenging ourselves to " Read Without Walls " so I introduced this book as a true story about someone who "thought without walls" and challenged himself to solve problems in his community.  We began by identifying different kinds of "communities" we might belong to: Ultimately we defined community as "A group of people that all participate, work together, do the same thing, and believe the same thing." We read the book together, pausing periodically to listen for the challenges in William's community. Challenges we identified included: No lights No rain No water No food No money No school With a working knowledge of what a "community" i...

We read The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind and identified what a community was during our last library block.  Now it was time to identify challenges in our own community and create a plan for changes. We began with a brainstorm of challenges in our community.  For some classes this was too big of a question and they did better with "challenges in our school."  I collected ideas on a padlet . Screenshot of our brainstorming Ideas fell into several categories and highlights included: Challenges in our school  Our playground is vandalized by older students Students don't follow the rules Students don't treat each other respectfully Bullying Challenges in our town Litter (this came up over and over) Some people don't have jobs or money Car accidents/bad drivers/poor road conditions Rail Trail - is this good for our town or not? Challenges in my personal life (concerns that directly effect students or cause them to worry) Money Ca...

Following our read of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind , students brainstormed challenges in our community and identified one that they would like to work on (see my post here ).  They identified a solution and then were ready to create a project to show their work. First we brainstormed what kind of projects these might be, thinking about what skills we had that we could employ.  Grades 2-5 used this list: PicCollage Chatterpix Build - Legos  Draw a picture or poster Google Slides Write a letter  Write a voicemail message A letter to our Principal proposing a Guard for our playground 1st graders were given a drawing assignment to show the "before" and "after" of their proposed solution.  They drew their thinking.   Challenge: We have bullies at our school. Challenge: People litter. Challenge: Some people don't get to come to our country because of the Preside...