Literacy

Inspire your students to enjoy reading with these 15 creative ideas you can use for years to come in your classroom, library, or school! Reading for pleasure leads to improved reading comprehension, writing skills, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development. Most importantly, reading for pleasure is crucial for developing life-long, avid readers.

Structured as a teaching unit of approximately six classes at the high school level, this presentation will analyze different aspects of Information Literacy and provides examples and tools for teaching Media Literacy. Each part is aligned with AASL Standards and some state standards will be discussed. Different types of misinformation will be explained and teaching strategies given.

Recent events have transformed school libraries and the ways children access reading materials. In this session, participants will explore research, then informally collect and examine data to define recent pivots to varied reading platforms. Participants will actively engage in discussion of innovative practices which have served as solutions to providing the best opportunities for our students. By reflecting on exchanged experience, participants will discover innovative solutions for access.

How do our shared or differing cultural backgrounds affect the relationships and influence we have with our students? Two white, award-winning authors and former educators discuss how unpacking the racial and class biases of our identities better enable us to foster more positive and authentic relationships with the young people in our lives.

2020 was a year of change across the world. In-person learning was cancelled. Remote learning was born. With this new development librarians were besieged with questions. One question that plagued many was how do you promote and engage students in literacy during a pandemic? Come find out how librarians in NYC tackled this question and learn the ways they used technology to create digital displays, booktalks, and vlogs to promote, encourage, and interact with students to get them to read!

This session will explore easy engaging ways to help students navigate the constant social media stream of information. We will tackle the infodemic, truthiness, fake images, and strengthen research skills to help end information poverty. We will explore quick activities to empower researchers you can use tomorrow!

Out of the pandemic came several new initiatives. Come learn about #LitFix, a digital book recommendation service with practical tips and resources to design & sustain your unique program back home. Learn how a teacher’s questions about GoogleSlides turned into a year long collaboration in Physics, First Line Fridays led to weekly contact with ELA teachers, and moving a signature math project all online was accomplished. You can equip your teachers with these tools and activities too.

We’ve all heard there’s no “going back to normal” and that includes our schools’ reading cultures. Four panelists spanning the PreK-12 spectrum share best practices to nurture a culture of reading, whether in school or at home, its evolution during a pandemic in a variety of learning environments, and how it continues to evolve. Join the discussion of newly emerging best practices to nurture a culture of reading both in the school building and virtually.

Do you want to connect with your limited English proficiency students but don't know how? Are they hesitant to come to the school library? Are you at a loss for how to help them find the books and information they want and need? This session will provide proven tips and tools on how to make your library a welcoming place and an information hub for Newcomer students. Bonus: These strategies and collection suggestions are great for reluctant readers of all ages!

In this session, participants will be introduced to the art of interactive read-alouds and 12 picturebook pairings they can use in order to create critical conversations with young readers during read-alouds. Participants will also engage in an interactive discussion to thoughtfully consider the ways single stories (i.e., stereotypes) can be productively dismantled or unproductively reified when sharing paired texts in elementary settings.

Research indicates that reading aloud has a powerful effect on student engagement, thinking, and reading achievement. It also shows that 40 percent of K-5 students prefer nonfiction, and yet, many teachers and librarians are hesitant to read nonfiction aloud. To change that, nonfiction author Melissa Stewart provides tips and tools for (1) identifying appropriate nonfiction titles, (2) reading nonfiction in a way that engages students, and (3) facilitating student responses to nonfiction texts.

"Multiple literacies" is essentially the content area in which school librarians are expected to provide instructional leadership to their students and faculty. In this session, participants will define “multiple literacies,” discuss effective strategies for integrating them into the curriculum, and explore the best resources for cultivating ongoing expertise in these literacies.