The Adventures of an International School Librarian

Today I discovered ReadWriteThink  and it has changed my life! There are so many fantastic lesson plans in there for a library. I started with my MYP 2 ATL class their lesson plan on creating a Book Trailer. The MYP 2's are a low level English speaking class. They constantly speak Chinese in the class which drives myself and the other teachers crazy. You spend 3/4 of the class repeating the same phrase over and over again"Please speak English!". So I thought I'd do something fun with them for the next 6 or so weeks making book trailers. We discussed what a good movie trailer looks like, what we expect when we go to the movie theatre and what the advertisement sells us in terms of entertainment. They panicked when I said they'd have to read a book in a week, so we compromised and they only had to read a Children's picture book for next week to discuss and present as there book trailer book. I'm going to do the same activity with MYP 1 who are fantastic ...

I completed my second IB workshop, this time it was entered towards the library which interested me so much more. The online workshop, Making the PYP Library the Hub of Learning  was absolutely fantastic and I learnt so much from it. It made me aware of skills that I have been lacking and am now more focused and determined than ever to change that. Primarily it revolves around IT. I want to upskill myself and learn to use Apps. I can't do it at the moment as I have no tablet to play around on which it makes it so much more difficult to do. I believe that technology is vital to any library, more so in a school library. As a teacher librarian we have a role to play in the school, yes physical books are amazing and irreplaceable but in order to do certain things like keeping children, who are digital natives, we must keep ourselves up to date and knowledgable about all the technology resources out there. I'm doing my best to start brightening up the library with displays and pos...