Students' input and participation improves a library's reach, and programs are more enticing for students when librarians include learners' perspectives. The interest level for students improves drastically when their peers announce programs and/or create promotional items to share what is happening in the school library. This article describes…

The students at the author's alternative, academic-recovery school come from their base schools and at the author's school are able to rewrite their own school stories. Some of that rewriting naturally happens in the library. Many of the students have experiences at multiple schools, but it is not until they come to the author's school that many…

This companion volume to "Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension," which covered lower grades, completes the educational arc by focusing on adolescent readers in grades 6-12. Drawing on the most current standards from the American Association for School Librarians (AASL) as well as cutting-edge research, this straightforward…

Imagine a classroom where students are actively engaged in seeking scientific knowledge from books and computers. Think of a classroom in which students fervently write to create PowerPoint presentations about their scientific topic and then enthusiastically practice their speaking roles to serve as docents in a classroom museum setting. Visualize…

Brandon School is a small pre-K through 8th grade school serving approximately 327 students. It does not have the funding that a lot of larger school districts have. When the special needs teacher approached the author a few years ago about high-interest, low-level books and asked for ideas to help her students read more, they came up with the…

Educational standards continue to be hot topics of discussion for this year and, no doubt, beyond. The Council of Chief State School Officials (CCSSO) and the National Governors' Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) has initiated a study based on "Common Core" English/Language Arts and Mathematics Standards. The release of…

E-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook are beginning to make their way into school libraries and classrooms. It's about time. E-readers have tremendous potential to entice reluctant readers to read more. A study that the authors recently conducted among low-reading-ability middle school students demonstrated that potential.…

Teachers often find themselves lamenting the loss of emergent readers to video games, television, and, most recently, the TTYL (talk/type to you later) culture of text messaging and Internet social networking. Trying to impart the joy of a good read to middle school students feels like pushing religion onto the perfectly content worshipers of…

Eighth graders offer librarians and language arts teachers the greatest challenge of matching the student with just the right book. These duplicitous creatures have a foot in two worlds. They are both children and young adults. While sixth graders may be emotionally immature, three years later, they are usually prepared for the young adult world.…

Developmentalists state that children are born with the intrinsic motivation to learn, but studies show that this intrinsic desire to learn begins to wane during the early school years, around third grade, and continues a steady decline through eighth grade. Intrinsic motivation is at the core of information literacy, the foundation for a desire…

This book allows the reader to team teach with a science specialist to drive home key library and media curriculum goals. Eight detailed chapters provide background and complete lesson plans that cover both library and general science skills and benchmarks. Included are reproducible student worksheets, tools for assessment, and a suggested…

The spin on Frazer School Librarian Laurie LeFever's entry for Syracuse University's 2007 E*LIT competition is what made her school literacy project for children with disabilities really unique. Instead of working with students to create a project that would be targeted toward children with disabilities, she actually used students with…

One of the most difficult problems of modern school practice is how to prevent overcrowding the curriculum, breaking up the school day into small fragments of time devoted to disconnected tasks, and dissipating the energies of the children to such an extent that the process of education is hindered rather than helped by the attempts to enrich and…