Our Manga Release Party was a huge success and a great way to end our Banned Books Week for 2022. We were able to fill eight shelves with new titles. During the party, we had over 300 checkouts in one day!  Our manga mural continued to build interest and excitement about the new collection and was finally completed in April 2023.  It takes books that kids want to read to get them to read. To order those books, we need to have an adequate budget.  We are so thankful our request was approved, but we would like something more consistent

A collection management plan is a backbone of a strong library media program.  It is based on our students'  and teachers' needs, and it can be a powerful tool in counteracting censorship as well as advocating for funds.  While we have a strong Collection Managment Plan, we will be rewriting it through an equity lens.  We believe this will help us be more successful with our task of advocating for an adequate operating budget.   We will use the collection analysis from Mackin to assist as well as the data from our EOY MTAC survey. 

Click on the above picture for our wish list that was proposed in March of 2023.  This list covers needs for library books and resources, furniture upgrades and replacement, fixing blinds, removing TVs, and keeping creative resources available in our Makerspace.  We created this list based on our Collection Management Plan, assessment of current materials, working with budget experts like Stacy Syms, and working with vendors met at NCTIES.   All of this is organized and ready for strong advocacy for 23-23. 

We work hard to make sure teachers know that we are here to support them in the information literacy, research, and literacy needs.  This menu is posted on our teacher support site, but we also go over it with all new staff and specifically did a training with the beginning teachers in the Social Studies department (agenda, our notes).  We worked hard to partner with multiple departments (co-teaching spreadsheet with lesson links) for customized lessons as well as offering specific lessons during Geek Week and Literacy Month.  After revamping our information literacy lesson with the five lenses from "Digital Detective," we redid our digital portfolio intros for our freshmen to include a quick artifact to teach them how to press pause when encountering the trigger lens.

Geek Week is always a highlight of our fall semester with our Library Media Students taking the lead in a research project incorporating the eWISE research model with action research.  During this week, my teammate and I focus on supporting teachers with the NC Digital Teaching and Learning Standards.  We taught 25 lessons with 7 different departments. After each lesson, we reflected and adjusted for maximum learning  and engagement.  These lessons were a major adjustment to the way we teach information literacy, but we will continue to learn and grow with the 5 lenses. 

Our county uses a research model call eWISE which we are responsible for supporting. Our Library Media Studies students are very familiar with this process through their action research with Geek Week and Literacy Month, but they still struggle with understanding the process that led to the product.  We created the Research Zone to assist with all types of research, both large and small, and added three more custom pathfinders this year.  Additionally we created another research project for Mr.  Dawson with his African American Literature class complete with and MLA works cited (student example here) .  We would very much like to be able to get the whole staff using this model as well as introducing it during opening professional learning.