Robin Hood library at PS 192 is part of the second cohort of libraries done by Robin Hood foundation. It is in existence since 2002. The Robin Hood L!brary Initiative was a partnership with the Robin Hood Foundation, a New York City nonprofit that fights poverty, and the New York City Department of Education. The goal of this collaborating initiative is to improve literacy by revitalizing school libraries. At PS 192, we make sure that this initiative is evident and make every effort to keep improving it.

It takes the whole village to raise a child. This is why we work with the school community in many ways. During the school day, we work collaboratively with the classroom teachers to work on activities aligned to the curriculum and to the New Generation standards. We aligned these collaborative lessons to our library standards as well. We develop lessons where the students not only become good library citizens, but who are also able to wonder, investigate, create and evaluate their work. To do this, we provide our students with the opportunity to conduct research every time is possible.

As a Robin Hood Library, we have a flexible schedule, which allows us to include activities and workshops for classrooms and for families. It also allows us to rotate our services in cycles to ensure that the entire school community benefits from the library services.

It is part of our goal to involve our parents in library life. We have 3 to 5 family literacy events during the school year. We conduct workshops during the day as needed for our parents. In these events, we inform our parents of the different resources available to them in our library as well as in the New York Public Library. We make an effort of educating our parents on topics like parenting, Internet safety, where to take their children, challenging behavior and more.

We start the day with our “Breakfast and Learn” program. The “Breakfast and Learn” Program starts 7:05 am and ends 7:59 am. We started the program with the intention to serve students as a safe heaven to those students whose parents drop them early in the school year to go to work. By opening the library for “Breakfast and Learn” in the morning, the students read, participate in learning centers and use the computers for reading or math remediation, as well as to conduct research. We also help them with homework when students need it.

Our after school program on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 2:30 to 4:30 consist on our intention of providing students with innovative ways to use our library. During this time we are offering our community school a STEAM program, Science, Technology, Arts and Mathematics. During this time, students will be able to come to the library from their after school programs to grow their brains in different ways. This will all be done with the idea of having fun while learning. In this way we have become an innovated library by providing our students with activities of a Maker Space program so our students are able to develop their critical thinking skills. We are all very excited about this!

So this is how we do it:

• Science: Reading into Science
• Technology: We use Computer Science through Google to teach our students coding using a simple programming language like Scratch. We are working with our robots where students can maneuver them in different formats. They can use scratch to program the robots or use the predefined program. We are also color coding language for our Ozobot robots! How exciting!
• Engineering: We participate with the Innovation! Grant Maker Space Program sponsored by NYC DOE Library Services with tools put together by DEMCO.
• Arts: We create different arts and craft activities aligned to read aloud stories.
• Mathematics: We intend to integrate mathematics by aligning it with some mathematics literature.