Celebrate International Literacy Day With These Special Books & Places To Read Online!

On September 8 we celebrate International Literacy Day! 

This is a day that is celebrated annually on September 8.  

With ILA (International Literacy Association) as a huge supporter of International Literacy Day, they share on their site, 

International Literacy Day (ILD), celebrated annually on September 8, shines a spotlight on global literacy needs, which goes hand in hand with ILA's mission: literacy for everyone, everywhere. On ILD (and every day), ILA advocates for a literate world by empowering educators, inspiring students, and encouraging leaders with the resources they need to make literacy accessible for all.

As we kick off a new year at Van Meter in our library and school, we are focusing on empowering and inspiring our students, teachers and families daily through literacy and the special experiences it brings to our community.  

This has been a goal of ours as we share books in our library and special places to read online; establish relationships with our readers; support and bring literacy to everyone, everywhere; and listen to our community on what they would like to see as part of our collection and library too.  

As we all get ready to celebrate International Literacy Day, here are a couple things we have done to promote and support literacy that you can do in your library and school community too. 

Being an innovation, 1:1 , K12 school, it is very important that we bring together all of the resources that our students, teachers and families will use in organized, useful and engaging ways.  This is especially important not only for our library space and shelves, but for our online spaces too.

My favorite tool to do this is Collections by Destiny!  I can bring together not only resources and books that we have in our own library collection, but other resources found online too. As I have been building lots of Collections for our teachers and students to use, one of my favorite is the Places To Read Online Collection, which contains all types of places to read for all ages.

You can check out Places To Read Online Collection here and it is public, so please feel free to share.

One of the first things you will see in this Collection is this wonderful Titlewave List. 

I just love the list that Follett put together in Titlewave for National Literacy Day too!  You will find it all here.  These lists they curate and put together as part of Titlewave are a great way to add amazing books and resources to your collection and community. And this is one you won't to miss!

One more place that our community goes read to a lot online is Symbaloo, which is a social bookmarking site and a place I have curated, shared and celebrated resources online for almost 8 years.  And of course, read, read, read! 

With Symbaloo, I can bring all of the resources together in beautiful webmixes with multiple tiles or links in each.  I love creating them and adding them to my Collections by Destiny.  This is the perfect mash-up and one that will work for your students, teachers and others too. 

We have met with almost all of the elementary classes these first two weeks of students as they bookmark Symbaloo on their laptop and iPad and will meet with all of the secondary next week.

This is one of my favorite things to do as we kick off the year because I know we will be putting amazing literacy experiences into their hands and hearts all year long. 

As you get ready to celebrate International Literacy Day, think about how you are going to put these literacy resources, tools and experiences into your community.