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TBS316. The best children's books to read aloud this Christmas | Children's books. School is out and Christmas is still some days away. Before the big TV viewing days of Christmas and New Year we want to have a few days which are screen free in which we will read aloud to them instead. What stories would you recommend? A quick look at the schedules will confirm that much of the screen time over Christmas and the New Year is filled with film versions of great books. One course of action could be to pre-empt the TV versions by reading the stories aloud. That way, your children would know the original version of a story and would also know that behind many films or TV dramas there is a great book – and the original may be better! The choice is big; here’s a selection of the very best books – whatever the film adaptation that are coming up may be like.

The glorious illustrations in Chris Van Allsburg wordless picture book, The Polar Express, tell of a magical journey to the North Pole for a little boy who is sceptical about Father Christmas. Waaaaaahhhhhh! In loooooooove... - Children's Books Daily. 10 Must Have iPad Apps for Librarians. October 25, 2015 As requested by some of our readers here in EdTech and mLearning, we went ahead and curated the list below comprising some of the best iPad apps for librarians. We have particularly focused on apps that enable librarians to search for, access, manage and read journal articles and some note taking and referencing apps. Additionally, we would also highly recommend Nicole Hennig's book ‘Apps for Librarians: Using the Best Mobile Technology to Educate, Create, and Engage’ which covers in more details over 100 Android and iPad apps for librarians.

Library Scientist has also this great list of apps to check out. 1- Penultimate The most natural digital handwriting experience on iPad, Penultimate gives you the convenience and feel of writing on paper with the added power and availability of Evernote. Take notes in class or a meeting, journal your thoughts, or outline your next big idea -- in the office, on the go, or at home on the sofa. 2- Notability. Resources for Youth Makerspaces. Maker Ed is delighted to make these materials available for free.

If you would like to order a printed copy of the Youth Makerspace Playbook, you may purchase one here. The Youth Makerspace Playbook is a resource providing context and support around planning spaces for youth to make. It offers practical suggestions on finding spaces to make, outfitting spaces with tools and materials, exploring the possible educational approaches within spaces, and sustaining spaces in the long-term. (Note: The Playbook has been updated as of Oct 13, 2015 to correct photo credits on pages 30 and 31.) Accompanying the Youth Makerspace Playbook is “Makerspaces: Highlights of Select Literature,” a selection of the latest thinking emerging from the growth of makerspaces and their developing roles in education and communities.

Youth Makerspace Playbook Site Surveys Join the Conversation with #MakerEdSpace Here are a few specific prompts to help you get started: Click here for #MakerEdSpace Prompts #MakerEdSpace. Sense and Sensibility: Why Librarians Remain Essential to Our Schools | Yohuru Williams. In the broad constellation of professionals who make up public schools, it is important to pause and acknowledge the forgotten education professionals who aide and support teachers.

These include the librarians, nurses, social workers, learning specialists, and guidance counselors. They contribute to the growth and development of our young people but often find themselves left out of broader discussions about the preservation of public education. They provide a range of critical support and intervention frequently invisible to us. Most certainly, their value has escaped the notice of so-called education reformers and politicians. All too often, these champions of a "new order" have taken aim at the forgotten teachers in their ever-expanding quest to cut public school funding. To be clear, budget and personnel cuts have hurt the profession across the board. Another equally hard hit position is that of the school librarian. A Thematic Approach to Planning Your Maker Spac...

Getting Graphic: Introducing Graphic Novels to the Classroom – Resources and Inspiration | ResourceLink. It is undeniable that we live in a new media age. In this age, literacy requires students to be able to make meaning from information in a wide variety of formats, one of the most prevalent being visual. The Australian Curriculum identifies the important role that visual literacy plays in contributing to a student’s overall literacy level, so much so that it forms one of the four major building blocks within the Literacy Capability. Within this context, the graphic novel is perfectly poised to provide a powerful teaching tool, which enables students to develop literacy skills. As Di Laycock identifies, graphic novels can be considered the ‘holy grail’ of literature, as they are truly multimodal texts, encompassing all five semiotic systems. All five semiotic systems combine to convey meaning in a series of panels. What is a graphic novel? You will note that in this quote, Eisner speaks about comic books as opposed to graphic novels.

Using graphic novels in the classroom References: Why the 'Maker Movement' is Popular in Schools. The maker movement is a global, DIY movement of people who take charge of their lives, solve their own problems and share how they solved them. And it's growing in schools that are searching for more authentic learning experiences for their students. Since the beginning of time, people have made things to solve problems and otherwise improve their quality of life. But previously, the amount of exposure individual projects received was limited. Now the Internet has driven projects into the limelight. "These things that used to be isolated are now shared widely," said Sylvia Libow Martinez, president of nonprofit education technology organization Generation YES and co-author of the book Invent to Learn.

"And coupled with new technologies, that makes it possible for people to make things that are useful and practical. " She shared an example of how this global movement works. From kindergarten to second grade, students traditionally make things with playdough, legos and other objects. Can children's books help build a better world? | Children's books. Let us set this upside-down world right again by starting with the children. They will show the grown-ups the way to go. Those were the words of Jella Lepman, a German-Jewish writer who fled Germany in the 1930s and returned after the second world war as the US Army’s advisor on youth issues. She found starving children who desperately needed food, medicine, clothes and shelter. But Jella Lepman also believed they needed books: great children’s books to help them make sense of their experiences, connect them to the rest of the world, and show them they were not alone. She was convinced that books for young people could create bridges of understanding across the barriers of the world.

So she founded an organisation called The International Board Of Books For Young People (or IBBY for short). As author David Almond says: “IBBY reaches out across all supposed barriers of border, language and race. But can books for young people really do this? I think books can help transcend “us and them”. Cut the teacher librarians last! A message from Kim Yeomans, Nick Earls and me. Yesterday I wrote a post in my school library blog about my visit to Kim Yeomans’ primary school library. I wrote it because I feel strongly about voicing the uncertain future of school libraries and teacher librarians. Kim’s current principal values her and her library but next year is uncertain with the appointment of a new principal. The same goes for me and my school library when our principal retires if I’m to be realistic.

The fact is that while we do the best we can in our roles as (teacher) librarians, we can never be sure how much we are valued and what our future holds. My post about Kim’s library and how it is a shining example of the heart in her contribution to the learning and wellbeing of her school can be read here. Kim wrote this comment after my post: Thank you for acknowledging the importance of primary school libraries.

Nick Earls is very clear about the importance of school libraries staffed by teacher librarians – bravo to your post, Nick! Kim. Curious about classroom Makerspaces? Here’s how to get started. Makerspace is a rapidly growing trend in schools across the country, but to be honest, I’ve never implemented one myself, and I can’t quite picture the logistics of orchestrating a Makerspace. How do kids know what to do? How can you find out what they’re learning? How do you make time for that with all the other tasks crammed into the school day?

And how do you keep the Makerspace from turning into a chaotic mess? I wanted to get answers to these questions from teachers who have extensive Makerspace experience, and not just at the secondary level. So, I invited Cheryl Nelson and Wendy Goldfein of Get Caught Engineering to share how they’ve managed Makerspaces in their own classrooms and helped other elementary and middle school teachers get started, too. Thank you, Cheryl and Wendy, for sharing your experiences below! What exactly is a Maker and what happens in the “space”? What materials do you use in a classroom Makerspace? How do students know what to build in the Makerspace? 1. 2. 3. The Judy O'Connell Daily. Storytelling with a wink and a smile: the arrival of the Emoji-pocalypse. Whether you view them as a scourge or a convenience, emoji are ubiquitous in online communication. In celebration of the power of the emoji, the National Young Writers' Festival is soliciting submissions for emoji stories for this year’s festival.

Dubbed the “Emoji-pocalypse”, the category is “tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also an exploration of different ways to use emojis to communicate,” says festival co-director Alexandra Neill. The emoji stories must be fewer than 140 characters (the same length as a tweet), and will be physically handed out as “capsule stories” throughout the festival.

The submissions fit into three categories. Neill acknowledges submissions may take a couple of read-throughs to understand, but a narrative is certainly present in the sequence of icons. A quick background on emoji Emoji are an evolution of the emoticon, a sequence of punctuation marks intended to represent a face. Schnoebelen has another observation about emoji: they have grammar. Emoji as stories. Are School Internet Filters the Forgotten Equity Battleground? Librarian as Teacher: Information literacy in special libraries, or, how to secretly teach people things. When I was in library school I learned that information literacy is something that is taught in classes and seminars, by professional librarians to small or large groups of clients.

While the content of information literacy training varied, what was made clear in the model I was presented with was that a client knew when they were being taught information literacy. However my first few jobs were in special libraries, in corporate environments. I found the difference between information literacy theory and practice very wide. Staff members, my clients, were not going to give 30 minutes or an hour of their time to ‘learn information literacy’ – not the least because they had been doing their jobs well before I came along, what did I have to teach them?

What became clear to me is that in special libraries we have to do information literacy by stealth. Training by stealth Working in special libraries often means working to a greater depth with a smaller group of clients. Like this: Apps for Librarians - the book - Nicole Hennig. School Libraries and Makerspaces: Can They Coex... The Kids' Guide to Google Search. Linking Literature to Makerspaces | ResourceLink.

Libraries seem to be the space where makerspaces are taking off. The library is a place of engagement, learning, discovery, belonging, community, creativity and innovation. A makerspace is a place of engagement, learning, discovery, belonging, community, creativity and innovation. In schools, the library is the only learning space not limited by curriculum; it is an open learning space, which can be interpreted in many ways, and I suggest that this is why so often makerspaces find their place there. Outside of schools, public libraries are increasingly one of the only ‘3rd places‘ where people can feel free to meet, collaborate and learn, without the pressure to spend (even coffee shops move you along if you linger without a coffee in front of you).

Not to mention that library staff are often the most open to new, exciting and innovative ways of interacting and engaging with learning and technology! There are several types of ‘maker’ books, and this blog will look at each in turn. See On. Theconversation. As a young child, I loved to imagine myself as a pioneer girl in Little House in the Big Woods, eating fresh snow drizzled with maple syrup. I even pestered my mother to make this treat with the dirty snow that fell on our Manhattan sidewalk.

Not a chance. Years later, I honored my young sons’ request to try a coconut after reading the adventures of Babar. Who knew that even a hammer and chisel won’t crack these nuts? I resorted to clearing out the sidewalk below and then pitching the fruit out a third-floor window. It worked, but thankfully there are many easier ways to bring food and reading together than hurling coconuts or eating dirty snow. Here are some of the connections I researched while working on my book, Home for Dinner. Dinner conversation builds vocabulary For starters, there is the linguistic pairing of reading and eating, shown in such common expressions as “devouring a good book” or being a “voracious” reader.

Encourage children to tell stories Make a literary meal. It’s Not About Shelving The Books and Keeping Kids Quiet | Nick Earls. Some schools no longer have teacher-librarians and, the more I see of teacher-librarians, the less sense that makes to me. What’s next? No teachers? Kids turning up to the classroom each morning and inventing the day ahead? Maybe there’s a note on the door about what the curriculum has in mind, maybe there isn’t … Each time I’m told that a school no longer has a teacher-librarian, I’m told that the school still has a library, as though the building does the job all by itself.

Some news for schools thinking of going librarian-free: having some books on shelves in the school’s second-biggest building – along with a chillout zone with half a dozen lunch-stained beanbags – does little for your students lives without a well-trained passionate human or two in there to wake the place up and get the most out of it. Some advice to anyone running school budgets anywhere: CUT THE TEACHER-LIBRARIANS LAST. Promoting reading promotes literacy and prepares students for life. Like this: Like Loading... 10 Tips For Launching An Inquiry-Based Classroom. Transforming teaching practices is a long, slow road. But increasingly schools and teachers experiencing success are sharing their ideas online and in-person. Science Leadership Academy opened as a public magnet school almost ten years ago in Philadelphia.

The educators that make up the school community have spent nearly half that time sharing best practices through a school-run conference each year and more recently by opening a second school in Philadelphia. Diana Laufenberg was one of the first SLA teachers and has gone on to help foster inquiry at schools around the country, most recently by starting the non-profit Inquiry Schools.

It takes time to build up a strong inquiry-based teaching practice, to learn how to direct student questions with other questions, and to get comfortable in a guiding role. But when Laufenberg talks about what it takes, she makes it sound easy. 1. Every teacher has a “bucket” of stuff she is responsible for teaching her students, known as standards. 2. Improve Your Vocabulary With the “Wheel of Feelings” f7c7dbe061ea11e5a153998e89303901_audio_mp3. Why kids should learn how to code - Life Matters. Wisdom in the Age of Information and the Importance of Storytelling in Making Sense of the World: An Animated Essay. Creative Courage for Young Hearts: 15 Emboldening Picture Books Celebrating the Lives of Great Artists, Writers, and Scientists. Lost for words? How reading can teach children empathy | Teacher Network. Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming.