We will see your children once in the alphabet cycle for nearly an hour. We are using the New York State Information Fluency Continuum to acquaint our students with the library standards, from choosing just right books, to actually locating them in the library using the Dewey decimal system, to learning how to ask the right question in a research project and a web search, to safe and effective practices in web searches.
Of course, literacy and learning to love books is an enormous part of our curriculum, developed and reinforced through read-alouds, author and genre studies, book talks and student shares, author visits, and ever-changing displays of our delicious materials. We have added nearly 500 new books of all genres and levels to the collection this fall, from the new Harry Potter and the new Mo Willems books to books on how to code and create online games, biographies, graphic novels, and non-fiction.
We celebrate through literature whenever we can--from Banned Books weeks (and it is a pleasure to see the irate responses we get from the children to censorship (yay!)), to March is Reading Month, and April is Poetry Month. We support Parents as Writing Partners in March and Parents as Reading Partners, a form of parent-child book club, twice a year in the Fall and Spring. Interested fourth graders are reporters on the Hillside Headlines newspaper, published from the Library three times a year.
