August 2023
Welcome to a new school year!
I am very excited to be back with your students for my 5th year at St Matthew. I am also excited to introduce your students not only to traditional library activities but to explorations of media literacy, information literacy, digital literacy, and applications for life long learning.
Students in PreK through 5th grade will come to the library once each week.
PreK and kindergarten will experience a traditional story time including songs, finger plays, puppets, flannel board figures and phonemic awareness (individual sound manipulation) activities. Some people wonder why songs and finger plays are used in early literacy activities. Both slow down language in a way that allows children to better distinguish the individual sounds in words. Puppets and flannel board activities engage students and improve recall. The goal of library is to develop a life long love of reading and to prepare students to become fluent readers through word play.
First and second grade students will be reading reading fiction through the month of September with a focus on making connections between the books and their own lives.
3rd grade will be practicing identifying the genre of a text. Our library fiction collection is organized by genre. Being able to identify the genre of stories they enjoy will make self selection of future independent reading choices more successful and will prepare students to look at the larger topic of library organization later in the quarter.
4th and 5th grades will begin the year reviewing library organization with a focus on non-fiction and the Dewey decimal system. We will also be refreshing our search skills in the library catalog and navigation in Sora our ebook collection.
Middle school digital, media, and information literacy skills are taught side by side with core subject areas through a push-in model. I will be pushing into the core subjects to work with students. This allows students to learn new skills with a purpose in mind. It also gives students more choice in showing what they know as we tackle video editing, podcasting, and digital publishing in the context of core subject assessment. We tackle research and citation skills as they need them in the classroom, and we analyze media as we evaluate sources of information. This is our third year using the co-teaching model, and I am optimistic that we have resolved issues regarding access to books for personal enjoyment. Students will have the ability to check out during at least one recess and one advisory period each week, I have streamlined the process by which students may place holds on books using our catalog that will be delivered to classrooms, and I have changed the process for logging into Sora )our digital library collection) so that students no longer need to remember separate user names and passwords but instead my log in to Sora using their cdstmatthew email accounts.
As always if I can be of assistance or if I can answer any questions you may have, please do not hesitate to email me at mtelerski@cdeducation.org