Check Out @FollettContent....NEW Name, Same Great Content For Our Libraries and Classrooms! Follow Along Today, Friends.

 

I love finding and following amazing places on social media!  

Our friends at Follett have a new place for us to follow. In fact, it has been around for awhile called @FollettClassroom, but now it has a new name.... @FollettContent! 

Follett Content is filled with great content for the library and classroom which includes free resources, recommendations, videos, information and more.

You can find Follett Content on Instagram at @FollettContent...

and on X (Twitter) at @follettcontent too. 

With a new year here, I know you will find so many new ideas and resources at @FollettContent for your library, classroom and school community too. 

A Choice Board Collection For The New Year Filled With PebbleGO, PebbleGO Next, Capstone Interactive eBooks and More! Find It Here, Friends.

 

As we get ready to celebrate the New Year, I am bringing together lots of resources to help our students learn about how others around the world celebrate their New Year too. 

I focused on four different holidays including Hmong New Year, Islamic New Year,  Lunar New Year and New Year's Day. I created a choice board collection to highlight each holiday and bring the resources together in an organized way. 

For each holiday, I went to...

...PebbleGo and...

....PebbleGo Next to look for articles, and to...

...Capstone Interactive to find eBooks to include in the choice boards. 

I created one slide for each holiday....

...that includes a lot of different resources to help our students learn and appreciate these special holidays. 

You will find the link to the Let's Learn About The New Year! Choice Board here.  This will allow you to make a copy and add your own links from PebbleGo, PebbleGo Next and Capstone Interactive eBooks. You can also include other resources. 

When you are ready to share the choice board with your students,  go to File and Publish to the Web. 

This will allow you to Publish to the web and will give you a link to share with your students. 

If you have questions or need help, please feel free to reach out. I am happy to help. 

Have a lovely New Year wherever you are, friends. I can't wait to connect with all of you in 2024. 

2 Special Calendars For January 2024 Read-Alouds from Our Friends At Novel Effect!

I love the calendars that our friends at Novel Effect put together for us each month. 

To kick off the new year, they have created two amazing calendars for January filled with books with special Novel Effect soundscapes. 

You can find the January Novel Effect Calendars here. 

Find out all about Novel Effect here too. 

The January 2024 Capstone Holiday Calendar and Book List Is Filled With Special Books and Events, Friends! You Will Find It Here.

It's almost January 2024 and time for a new set of books on the January Capstone Holiday Calendar.  I love using these calendars to highlight books each month from our collection. 

It's a great way to celebrate and learn about topics that tie into our curriculum including important historical events, and other special events that our kids love to learn and read about throughout the year. 

You will find the Capstone January Holiday Calendar here, along with the other months too. 

And here is the January 2024 Capstone Holiday Calendar Book List where you will find the links to the books on CapstonePub.com.

When the Capstone Holiday Calendar comes out each year, I go through and mark the books we have in our library collection, and add the books to my list that I'd like to order for my collection each month too.

You can read all about the 2023-24 Capstone Holiday Calendar Poster here, friends. 

You've Been Virtually Book'd With These Summer Reading Books....A Special Program and List I Use Within Our Destiny Discover & Library Each Month!

Every year around this time, we all start thinking about summer reading. I spend a lot of time planning how to best support our readers in meaningful, helpful and personalized ways. 

When I plan summer reading for our students, I think about how successful we have been at including not only wonderful books, but also eBooks, audio books and other digital resources within our library summer reading program.  

One thing I did was put together a list and choice board filled with 16 new and favorite books from our Destiny Discover that will be perfect for summer reading. 

And being in a preschool to 12th grade school, I made sure to include something special for all of our readers.  

Let me show you how I set up this choice board for my school community. 

First, I created the choice board in a Google Slide.  I added the covers of the 16 books I included in the list.

Second, I went to our Destiny Discover and grabbed the links to each book. 

This is easy to do.  You just search for the book, click on the three little dots in the entry, 

and the drop down menu shown in the image above will appear. 

Click on Share and the link to the book will pop up. That is the url to share in the choice boards. 

I love how I can also download the QR Code.  Isn't that cool? 

Take the copied link and add it to the book cover.  

When every book cover is linked, you are ready to share the choice board. 

Go to File and down to Publish to the web.  

This will give you a link to share with the students and teachers.  

When they click on that published link, the You've Been Virtually Book'd With These Summer Reading Books choice board will pop up. They can then click on each book cover to find them in our Destiny where they can read more about the book, find them in our library and even put them on reserve. 

I am excited about this list of 16 special new books I put together in Titlewave.  In this choice board, you can click on any book cover to view in Titlewave and find the full book list there too. 

If you want to make a copy to add your own Destiny Discover links from your library, click here. 

Even with several months to the summer, it is never too early to start planning the best summer of reading for our students.  I hope this will help you make summer reading plans for your readers too. 

I Am Excited To Share My Top 12 Capstone Books From 2023, Friends!

2023 was an amazing year of new books!  I loved finding, reading and sharing lots of new books with our readers at Van Meter School, and with so many other students, librarians, teachers, families and communities. 

In the library this week, I am putting together a few upcoming book displays that will be ready to go when everyone comes back to school in the new year.  

One of the book displays I am so excited about is my Top 12 Capstone Books from 2023.  We have all of these books in our library, and many of them in our Capstone Interactive eBook collection too. 

In this special choice board, Shannon's Top 12 Capstone Books from 2023, you will find all 12 of the books.  When you click on the book cover, it will take you right to CapstonePub.com where you can find our more about each title.  

At the bottom of the choice board, you will find a link to the list of all 12 books including...

...these wonderful books,  and I couldn't leave out my new book, Sonia's Digital World. 

I hope you have enjoyed these books as much as I have in 2023.  You will find the entire list of My Top 12 Capstone Books of 2023 here, friends. 

And I already can't wait to share more about the upcoming 2024 Capstone books. You can check them out here in this blog post. 

4 Special Ways To Welcome Everyone Back For The New Year With StickTogether!

With the New Year right around the corner, I am thinking of special ways to welcome everyone back to our library and school community.  

Today, I would love to share 4 special ways to welcome everyone back for the new year with all of the amazing StickTogether projects and ideas.

1. I created this little sign to pair up with the new StickTogether Sticker Posters that I will hang in our library and in other collaborative spaces around our school.  

Our students haven’t seen the new Cats and Dogs Collection yet so these will be such a fun way to kick off the New Year. You can find this collection here on the StickTogether site.

2. Our students and teachers also LOVE the Virtual Stickerboards. In the newly updated Virtual Stickerboard platform, there are 100's of images to choose from and something for all throughout the year. There are monthly galleries filled with holiday-themed Stickerboards that go along with their StickTogether Virtual Sticker Board Monthly Calendars.

In fact, the January Gallery which launches on January 2, 2024, will be filled with images tie to all kinds of different ways to celebrate as a community throughout the month.

You will find the Virtual Stickerboard site here. You can get a Basic subscription for $30, which includes the January Gallery, or a whole school subscription of 40 seats for $400.

3. As our students and teachers come back to school in January, I am excited to invite them to be part of our 2024 Pixel Art School Wide Mural.

I created the posters above to hang up throughout the middle and high school hallways making it easy for our older students to scan the QR code and create their Pixel Art portrait with their phones. I will send our the link to our elementary students and teachers in Google Classroom so they can complete on their Chromebooks.  

With the new Pixel Art Dashboard, it makes it really quick and easy to print these off or download to put together in a mural collage with Canva or Google Classroom.

4. I have been dreaming up lots of fun new ways to use Puzzle Face in the new year. I am going to feature a Guess Who? Puzzle Face in our secondary library each week.  To start, I am going to pick one of our administrators and see if the students can guess who it is as they put it together in our library. 

I will take a picture of each completed Puzzle Face and feature them in our Van Meter Puzzle Face Gallery outside of the library. 

If you want to use this poster I made, you can find it here to copy for your own.

I hope these ideas give you ideas and inspiration to bring StickTogether to your school in 2024 with these 4 ways and even more too.

Speedy Makerspace Stations For Our Librarian PD With StickTogether Pixel Art, Adobe Express, LEGO Ornament Challenge and More!

 

This week, I went to visit my amazing librarian friends at HCISD in Harlingen, Texas. We celebrated our work together with a day of learning, connecting, sharing and more. 

In the afternoon, we moved through five Speedy Makerspace Sessions. 

Our stations were Pixel Art, Edible Art, Lego Ornament Challenge, Christmas Origami, and Adobe Express Christmas Cards. 

I loved bringing the Pixel Art station.  I used the StickTogether Pixel Art site for this station. On the poster I created, I added a QR code and bit.ly.  This activity asked them to create a self portrait with pixel art. I will create a special group pixel art mural with all of their self portraits. 

They could scan the QR code to create on their device or...

...type in the bit.ly to create on their laptop. 

It was so much fun watching them create their pixel art self portrait. 

They had a great time too. 

You will find the StickTogether Pixel Art site here, friends.  It's a free site and as you can see, super fun for all ages and can be used in so many ways. 

I loved this time as we created together. It was the perfect way to come together during this special day.