Direct+Services+&+Instruction

My focus delivering services and instruction has a dual concentration on promoting literacy and building information skills. toc

**Promoting Literacy**
I spend a lot of time doing readers' advisory, trying to match students and adults with materials that will meet their needs. This is an area where I feel I'm quite effective. I strive to get to know the reading tastes and requirements of the nearly 1000 people I serve, and I am diligent about knowing the LC collection and materials for young adults.

I work with classes, groups, and individual students. Even when students can't talk to me personally, I try to leave plenty for them to find through displays, reading programs, and virtual services. The power of the peer is paramount, so whenever possible I try to leverage peer recommendations.

**Young Adult Literature - My Own Reading**
My goal is to read two young adult books a week. I track and write brief annotations about the books I read from the Highland Library Collection using [|LibraryThing]. Earlier this year I surpassed 400 titles read during my time at Highland.

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Building Information Skills
All students need well developing information skills to access, evaluate, and use information in their academic and daily lives. I continue to try to weave information skills into the all the content areas. It is my philosophy that learning these skills in isolation is dull and fails to provide the opportunity for students use and transfer the skills in a meaningful way.

The spiraling and ensured experiences of these skills from 6th - 8th grade has been something that is an on-going work in progress where I feel I have much room for improvement.

This year I led sessions with students in a wide range of disciplines across all grade levels including middle skill skills, science, social studies, language arts/lit, and arts block. We covered topics from citation to using databases to better searching to notetaking to avoiding plagiarism. I also led sessions and offered individual helps on using various technology tools.

Many projects and the accompanying resources can be viewed on the LC Website Pathfinders page.

Example Sessions
I worked with all the 6th grade science classes on their mineral trading cards. This was a two-day effort where day one was research basics. Day two covered how to use the Big Huge Lab trading card maker. The resources guide for the project can be seen here.
 * Session with 6th Grade Science:**

Each trimester I collaborated with Priya Varghese on a session with her gifted classes on a topic related to libraries and information that tied into the novel or writing project being studied at the time. Session one was about banned and challenged books. Session two was about the future of the book and the impact of the Internet on learning and brains. Session three was about philosophy in every day life.
 * Sessions for Priya Varghese's classes:**

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Over the course of the year, I'm asked to present or speak at various department meetings. I gave part of my talk from Priya's class to the LA/Lit department as a way to think about where the format of books may be heading. media type="custom" key="9136516"
 * Sessions for LA/Lit Department**

Other learning are offered to the Highland community through the library throughout the year.

Lunch Bunch Book Clubs
Each grade level has a book club which meets at lunch time approximately once a month to eat together and talk about our book. There are some voracious readers at Highland and some students who need a place to belong. We are making plans to continue to meet virtually and in person over the summer! Our book club website is here.

[[image:Lincoln2011_sticker.jpg width="177" height="133" align="right"]]Caudill/Lincoln Program
In Illinois there are several readers' choice award programs for various age groups. We have been running a hybrid Caudill/Lincoln program at Highland. The Caudill Program is for Illinois 4 - 8 graders. The Lincoln Program is for high school students. Since we have 3/4 of the 8th grade requiring this reading, we usually incorporate about 10 books from the Lincoln list in order to give those students more choices that appeal to their age and reading interest.

Students who read at least 3 books from the Caudill list get to vote for the Award winner. This year we had 280 students vote. The winning book at Highland was Suzanne Collins' //Hunger Games//. This book also won both the Caudill and Abe Award for the state of Illinois.

Battle of the Books
As a way to end the Caudill/Lincoln program, we have an in-house Battle of the Books challenge between the participating 8th grade classes. It is always fun and a rocking celebration of reading in the library!

I also take a team of students to the Lake County Battle of the Books. I started it with another school librarian about 7 years ago and it has since expanded to include multiple teams from four middle schools. This year we had thirteen Highland students representing all three grade levels participate.

Mystery Night
This fall we did a Mystery Night in the Library as part of a month where we were highlighting the mystery genre. We had an interactive murder mystery event where the participants acted as detectives and some the Thespian Society students played the suspects and other characters. We had a turnout of about 40 people.

Other events and programs sponsored by the library include the monthly research challenges, the Earth Day Book Swap, the twice annual book fairs, and the literary magazine, //Write in the Middle.//