Currin's Library Blog

Inquiry Post 1: Fostering a Reading Culture With the influx of student teachers and the return to the staff room after Covid, the conversation at lunch has shifted to reading.  More importantly, it has become a conversation about how to effectively teach reading, and how student teachers feel unprepared to teach this most important of skills.  To be fair, I did not feel entirely prepared to teach reading when I graduated from the education program at my university, and creating fully literate citizens continues to be a focus in my teaching.  It is the area in which I am the least confident, perhaps because it is the area I feel the most pressure to excel.   I know that simply providing kids with a lot of opportunities to read is not enough.  In the article, “For Students Who Are Not Yet Fluent, Silent Reading Is Not the Best Use of Classroom Time” Jan Hasbrouck states that, “ ‘The National Reading Panel* (NRP) concluded there is insufficient support from em...

Libraries for the Future, Part Two  In my last blog post I identified four issues and areas of interest for my future as a teacher librarian: data based literacy instruction, differentiated instruction for diverse learners, healthy technology use, and authentic content creation. In this blog post I will share resources that I have found, which will deepen my understanding of these issues. Data based literacy instruction: This interest centers around a student’s ability to read text in any format, from print books to news websites because “[e] vidence shows that students who do not learn to read on level by 3rd grade are much more likely to develop low self-esteem, drop out of school, and engage in antisocial and aggressive behavior” (The Balanced Literacy Diet).  Certainly, the library is beautifully situated to advance reading and literacy in the school, and as such, the librarian should be at the forefront of reading instruction.  The following is a list of resources to...