Watch Now! Destiny Tune-Up for Back-to-School from our friends at Follett School Solutions!

 

This week, we had so much fun on the Follett School Solutions webinar, Destiny Tune-Up for Back-to-School.  

The recording and resources are now available for everyone to watch, friends. 

You will find the recording and resources here. 

10 Back-to-School Tips From Shannon & The Library!

              

Hi friends!

This is one of my favorite times of the year as we get ready for a new year at school and in the library with our students and teachers. We dream up amazing ideas, bring back routines that have worked in the past, and look for ways to make each day meaningful, special, and fun for everyone within our school community.

Here in my new post on Capstone's Back-to-School site, you will find 10 of my favorite back-to-school tips to help make this your best school year yet!

Follett Book eFairs Are Here, Friends! You Can Sign Up For Yours Today.

 

Have you seen the exciting news, friends?  Follett Book eFairs are here and we can sign up for our Fall Book eFairs today. 

In fact, I signed up for our first one of the year already. We are going to kick off the year having a Follett Book eFair in September. I love that we will be able to bring this amazing book event to our students, families and community this fall.  

Let me show you how you can sign up for yours too! 

On the Follett Book eFairs site here, you will find everything you need to get started and run a super successful eFair.  

I especially loved checking out the Promotion, Rewards and eGift Cards sections.  They have provided so many amazing resources. 

You can schedule your Follett Book eFair today by clicking here to register. 

It will take you to the main Follett Book eFairs site where you click on...

 ...School Staff to Register and create your online book fair.  This is also where you will Login to manage and promote your event.  

I can't wait to start sharing our Follett Book eFair with our students, teachers, and families. I am going to share it at our Back to School Night and first newsletter.  It will be a wonderful addition to our book fair we have in October. 

I hope you check out Follett Book eFairs too, friends. Just click here to get started. 

Join Our Friends At Literacy for Texas For Their NEW Back-to-School Webinar, Practical Tips for Weeding & Dynamic Shelving + Must Have Fall Titles!

 

Our friends at Literacy for Texas have an exciting new back-to-school webinar.  It's called Practical Tips for Weeding & Dynamic Shelving + Must Have Fall Titles. 

As shared in the invite, 

Gear up for the new school year with impactful “weed and feed” resources from the Literacy for Texas Team and special guests! Learn about various strategies for weeding outdated materials, how to incorporate easy dynamic shelving methods, and various ways to curate materials to ensure your collection remains relevant and engaging. Additionally, we’ll spotlight the must-have titles for the fall, helping you refresh your library with the latest and greatest reads. Join us to learn, share, and prepare your library for a successful and vibrant school year ahead! Three lucky participants will receive a $20 Amazon Gift Card for their participation!

Register here now and ensure your library is prepped and ready for the upcoming school year!

Big News, Friends! 55 New PebbleGo & PebbleGo Next Articles Went LIVE In July! Check Them Out, Here!

 

We LOVE when our friends at Capstone announce NEW articles are coming to our favorites, PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next.  

And guess what?  This month, there are 55 NEW articles in PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next. 

In this blog post, you will find the 30 new PebbleGo articles. 

And in this blog post, you will find the 25 new PebbleGo Next articles. 

Also, don't forget that there are several NEW Olympic articles in PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next included in this release too. You will find more about these articles here.

I can't wait until our students at Van Meter explore all of these amazing new articles! 

Creating A "Library Post Box" For Book Recommendations and Book Wish Lists! Find Everything You Need Here, Friends.

Last weekend, I was at the local farm store and found the cutest little metal post box and matching recipe card holder.  It was on clearance so I decided to pick it up for the library. I thought it would be such a fun new addition to our library for students and teachers to put their book recommendations and book wish lists. 

Here is how I turned this into our Library Post Box! 

I measured the spaces on the post box and recipe box. I went to Canva and made three different templates with those measurements. 

You will find the Library Post Box main sign here, 

the little sign on the mail slot here, and...

...the sign for the recipe box here.

For the book recommendations and book wish list notes, I will use the designs and sticky notes I created in Canva too. 

In the post, Book Recommendation Notes and Post-It Notes For Students and Teachers To Use & Read In Our Library, I share how I created these book recommendation Post-It Notes. 

Our students love adding these to books, and this year I am going to make the doors to our library a place to load up with the book recommendations too. 

In the post, Giving Our Readers A Place To Share What They'd Like To See In Our Library, I share how we gave our students a place and way to share what books they would like in our library. 

The post includes the Canva template....

...and everything you need to make these, and mix them up for your library. 

I hope you can take this idea and use it, friends. Even if you don't find a post box like the one I found, you can use these resources to make a place for your students to make book recommendations and create book wish lists too. 

The August 2024 DEMCO Activity Calendar Is Here, Friends!

 

I love the DEMCO Activity Calendars that my wonderful librarian friend, Nadine Poper, creates with our friends at Demco. 

They have released the August 2024 Demco Activity Calendar and it is filled with so many amazing activities and such fun for learning. You will find them here. 

I also love that the featured book in August is one of the newest from our friends at Capstone, Divya, Far From Home by Sita Jit and illustrated by Abhilasha Khati. You will find it on capstonepub.com here.

You will find all of the DEMCO Activity Calendars here. 

Join Me Today For The NEW Follett School Solutions Webinar, Destiny Tune-Up For Back-to-School!

                  

Join me today for the NEW Follett School Solutions webinar, Destiny Tune-Up for Back-To-School at 2:00pm CST.  This webinar will give you so many ideas, resources, and inspiration, friends. 

As shared in the invite online, 

In this informative session led by librarian leader Shannon McClintock Miller, you'll discover how to leverage Follett Destiny® Library Manager to create a dynamic and engaging library environment. Shannon brings her wealth of experience and innovative strategies to help you transform your library into a vibrant center for learning and discovery.

This webinar is a must-attend event for any librarian or educator looking to make the most of their library resources and create an engaging, supportive environment for their students. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from one of the leading voices in the library community and take your library to the next level!

What You'll Learn:

During this session, you'll gain valuable insights into the following areas:

·        Setting Up Your Library Hub: Learn practical steps to configure your Destiny Library Manager homepage to captivate and inform your students and staff. Shannon will guide you through customizing your library space to make it a welcoming and informative environment that encourages exploration and learning.

·        Creating and Sharing Choice Boards: Discover how to design interactive and educational choice boards to enhance student engagement, reading, and learning. Shannon will demonstrate how to embed these choice boards within your Destiny Library Manager, making it easy for students to access and enjoy a variety of reading materials and activities.

·        Using the Destiny Dashboard: Learn how to highlight, track, and celebrate your reading community all year long. The Destiny Dashboard offers powerful tools for monitoring library usage, tracking reading trends, and celebrating the achievements of your students.

·        Destiny Discover Engage: Keep your readers engaged and excited in their independent reading journey through recommendations, programs, challenges, and more. Shannon will show you how to use Destiny Discover Engage to create a personalized reading experience for each student, fostering a lifelong love of reading.

You can register for this free, 30-minute webinar here. And don't worry if you can't attend live. The recording, slides and resources will be shared after the webinar.  

I hope to see you there, friends. I can't wait for this one! 

Kick Off The New Year With The August PebbleGo & PebbleGo Monthly Holiday Calendar! Turn It Into An Interactive Research Choice Board For Your Students & Teachers!

It's time for a new school year and time for a NEW year of the amazing PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Monthly Holiday Calendars that our friends at Capstone create for us each month. 

In this post, I share more about the PebbleGo Monthly Calendars. 

I love making paper copies of these to share with our teachers and kids. 

They hang them up in their classrooms and hang them in our library too. I also share them online through social media and as an image in Google Classroom or Seesaw. 

The teachers even use the PebbleGo Calendars for mini research opportunities throughout each week. The students use PebbleGo Create to share what they learn throughout the month with the calendars. 

Here is the PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next August 2024 Holidays Calendar. 

Last year, when I was sharing the calendars with teachers and students, I thought....Hey, this would be really fun in a choice board! 

So, I opened up a Google Slide, uploaded the PebbleGo August 2024 Holidays Calendar, and added a little chalk board with text over the top.  

Then I went through the calendar and found every special day in PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next.  

For example, World Wide Web Day is August 1, so they have the What is the internet? PebbleGo article featured. I went to PebbleGo and found the article about What is the Internet?

 I grabbed the link, as shown in the image above. 

I took that link and added a linked text box around each special date. 

Now, when the kids click on a holiday, it will take them directly to that PebbleGo article.  

If you want to use the template to create your own, you will find the Google Slide here to make a copy and add links to the PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next articles. 

And to make it a choice board, just Publish to the web, as shown in this image above. 

You will share that Published Link with your students.  

I love sharing these interactive PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Holiday Calendars with our students and teachers. They love learning all about these special days that are highlighted each month too.

I am excited to have the August 2024 PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next ready to go as we go back to school the end of the month. I hope you will find ways to use it with your students and teachers this month, and all throughout the school year too. 

8 NEW Olympic PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next Articles LIVE Today, Friends! Check Them Out!

 

The 2024 Summer Olympics start today in Paris. I am so excited to watch the Opening Ceremonies and to see all of the amazing athletes and highlights throughout the next two weeks. 

Our friends at Capstone created 8 NEW Olympic PebbleGo and PebbleGo Next articles for us. And guess what. they are LIVE today!  

In PebbleGo Social Studies, you will find an entire category called The Olympics. 

This includes Olympic Games, Summer Olympics and Winter Olympics. 

In PebbleGo Next Social Studies,  you will find....

...an amazing Olympic Games article in the Culture category. 

And then in PebbleGo Biographies, there are four new articles featuring a few of the biggest stars in Paris for this year's games. Readers will love reading about Gabby Thomas, Breanna Stewart, Jordan Chiles, and Frederick Richard, in addition to all of the other Olympians who already have articles in PebbleGo.

I am creating a special choice board collection to share and will post that on my blog later today. This will be a great thing to share with your students as they watch the Olympic Games this summer. I plan to share the choice board on my library social media and in a special newsletter too. 

Have fun watching the Olympics, friends. 

Friends, Please Join Us At The PebbleGo Community! You Can Apply Today.

 

Friends, we would LOVE to have you join the PebbleGo Community. 

As shared on the new PebbleGo Community site, 

PebbleGo’s community of educators share ideas and a vision for improved learning experiences and work every day to help kids succeed by making learning fun. We‘re looking for K-5 educators who want to share their teaching experience with others as part of a like-minded community of volunteers.

PebbleGo Community members are given early access to product releases, invited to dedicated events, and are provided with excellent opportunities to grow their professional learning network. As part of this program, you'll learn new teaching strategies and receive exclusive insights and benefits. Join the community to transform learning with the PebbleGo team in new and meaningful ways!

 

Apply here today to be part of this special new community. I can't wait for all of the amazing experiences, resources and fun the PebbleGo Community will bring. 

Join Us For Back-to-School Special: Ask A Future Ready Librarian on August 14! You Can Register Here, Friends.

 

Join us for an exciting and interactive webinar on August 14, 2024 at 5:00-6:00pm EST. This one is designed to kick off your school year with a boost! 

Our "Ask a Librarian" webinar, hosted by the inspiring Shannon McClintock Miller, offers a unique opportunity to engage with four exceptional librarians from across the country. These experts will be on hand to answer your questions and share their experiences in creating innovative, collaborative, and student-centered learning library communities.

During this webinar, you will:

Gain insights into best practices from experienced Future Ready Librarians

Address challenges and opportunities in implementing the Future Ready Librarians Framework

Learn strategies for success and professional growth in library leadership roles

We encourage you to bring your questions or submit them beforehand to ensure they are addressed during the session.

Register today - it’s FREE! https://futureready.link/frlwebinars

P.S. Even if you can’t attend live, register anyway to receive the on-demand video as soon as it’s available.

P.P.S. Submit your questions to Lia Dossin at ldossin@all4ed.org

Thinking About Genrefying Your Library? Here Are Our Top 10 Tips & Tricks For Genrefication, Friends.

  

This summer, one of Shannon's Summer Series webinars from Follett Content was all about genrefication. Genrefication is the process of organizing, classifying, and categorizing items into genres, making it easier for our readers to browse and find books they want to read. It also helps our teachers find books they want to tie to the curriculum and use with their students in the classroom. 

Two of my special teacher librarian friends, Amanda Chacon and Lauren Mobley,  joined me for the amazing conversation and learning that took place in the webinar, Dewey or Don’t We? 

During the webinar, we spoke about the pros and cons of genrefication, and went on to share our favorite tips and tricks when taking on the task of genrefying your library collection.  Before I share the webinar recording and resources, I would love to share 10 Tips for Genrefication that I took away from the webinar, and that I have used within our library at Van Meter School, too. 

Here Are Our Top 10 Tips & Tricks for Genrefication 

1. ASK A FRIEND

As you are thinking about genrefying your library, ask a few friends to help. This will really speed along the process. It is also super helpful to have others to talk to as you are weeding and going through the process of genrefying your library.  

My daughter, Brianna, who was a senior at my school at the time helped genrefy our collection along with several other students in elementary and middle school. It was great to have the feedback of our readers.  After all, it is their library. 

2. WEED

The first step when you get to your shelves, is to weed. Weed, and then weed again. When I genrefied our library, one of the best things about the process was getting my hands on every single book we had in our collection.  As you are weeding and moving things around, you get to know your collection so well. 

It’s super helpful to run an online collection analysis with TitleWise.  You can then get a personalized report that shows the weaknesses of the collection, and also the strengths. This helps to plan an effective weeding strategy as you explore and sort the books in your collection, while looking for possible weeding candidates. 

3. DEFINE 

Next, define the genre categories you want for your collection. I like to call these  the “book neighborhoods” in our library. You want to be sure the decisions you make when creating your categories or book neighborhoods help the students and teachers find books throughout the library and on the shelves. Are they helping them locate books?  Does it help them find relatable books? Does it get them excited about browsing the shelves? I love how it gives them a “bookstore” feel and provokes conversations and curiosity. 

Tag Explorer within Titlewave is super helpful. You can browse BISAC Subject Headings, Sears Subject Headings, and Follett Tags. This really helped us define the genre categories for our library. 

4. CHAT 

When we were defining our genre neighborhoods, I talked to our readers a lot. It’s important to listen to your students in this process.  As we shared in the webinar, create special sections for the most requested and popular books, and even change these up throughout the year with holidays, award books, most popular authors, and more. 

5. MAP 

After defining the genre categories, it is time to lay out a map of where you want the genre neighborhoods to be throughout the library.  Think about what makes sense to your readers, and to your teachers. 

When we had our map laid out, we took sticky notes and labeled all of the shelves with the genre categories. I kept these up for a few days and moved them around as I thought through the locations and how we wanted them arranged. 

6. TEST 

It is now time to move books around into these genre neighborhoods. You don’t have to do the whole library at one time. You can make changes in small chunks. 

Before I tackled our entire library, I tested it out first with graphic novels. I took all of the graphic novels and moved them onto a big shelf section that was located right where the kids walked into the library. I made a colorful sign that said, Check out our graphic novels!  I watched and studied what happened to the circulation of graphic novels. Within a few days, the circulation of all graphic novels increased and our readers were so excited to see so many in our collection. So I then tried it with some of our nonfiction that was never checked out, and the same thing happened.  Just by moving things around, we got our readers' attention. After that experience, I knew it would be a hit to genrefy our library.   When our library opened that fall, it was ready for our readers. 

7. LABEL

One of the most important things about genrefying is the signage and labels. It is important for students to be able to walk into the library and find what they need by browsing the signage and labels. In the webinar, we shared how important it is to use pictures and words so that all readers can find what they need on the shelves. 

Follett Content has amazing custom genre label designs in the Do-It-Yourself Genre Kits in Titlewave. They include the spine labels, shelf labels, and posters. You can also use or even have Follett Content apply  color coded protector labels to help define and label  genre neighborhoods.

8. GET EXTRA HELP

When you need extra help, Follett Content also provides support through their Library Genre Services. These services are customized to meet the unique needs of each library. They can even help genrefy your book order with genre labels so you don’t have to do it yourself, and then ship your books shelf-ready and in genre order! And I love how our genres were even added to our Titlewave account, which makes it very easy for cataloging.  

9. TAKE YOUR TIME 

We worked on the project for about 8 weeks one summer. But that is pretty fast. With the help of our students using the library, we refined it throughout the entire school year

Genrefication is a slow process and it’s normal for it to go on for many weeks and even months!  Take your time and work on one section at a time.  

10. BE OPEN

Within all of these tips and tricks in genrefication, one of the best tips I have to share is to be open and prepared to continue to make changes and adjustments to your genre neighborhoods. 

Even once our library was genrefied, we continued to make changes throughout the year.  In fact, we continue to make changes every single year. That is one of the great things about genrefication. Be open to suggestions from your readers. Be open to suggestions from teachers.  And remember, you don’t have to do everything at once. 

Now that we have shared 10 Tips and Tricks for Genrefication, check out the webinar, Dewey or Don’t We? here on demand.  You will also find the webinar slides and resources here.