Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Welcome to the 2014-2015 School Year!

Welcome back staff and students! We are excited to be busy so early in the school year! Mrs. Bender is getting new books ready as we speak and Mrs. Lott is visiting all Language and Literature classrooms for orientation sessions. If you are absent or have missed the session, don't worry! The Narrable part of the presentation is located HERE and we can catch you up on the rest!

We are making it our goal this year to encourage and reward students for using 2 wonderful information literacy tools--Destiny Quest and Mackin VIA. Destiny Quest is our library collection catalog where you can search our 9,000+ print items that can be checked out and brought home. (There are also links to the ebooks here, but for the most part, these are physical books.)  Mackin VIA is where you will find the eresources that we have purchased or subscribe to. These are 400+ items that you will need to access online--either on a computer, chromebook, or through an app on a mobile device. We have fiction and non-fiction titles, as well as access to the following databases in the Mackin VIA portal: CultureGrams, Inside the NFL, Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society, BrainPOP, and several WorldBook Encyclopedias. And, we are already circulating our 18 Updated Kindles! These were recently updated and now have 29 titles on each of them! Check out this Kindles list for the titles! (Choose Kindles from the lists in the middle of the screen.)

Needless to say, if you are looking for something to read, we have many items to choose from! If you need help figuring out which resources might help you the most, please come see Mrs. Lott or Mrs. Bender...we are here to assist!

Additional Resources:
I use a social bookmarking tool called diigo to gather relevant websites and resources for teachers and students. Here is the link to the school's groups. The International School at Thornton Middle has links relevant for everyone, while the Teacher PD links are more for our teacher audience.

Have you seen Wonderopolis? What an amazing website! It is full of interesting articles and is organized around principles of inquiry. All of the articles begin with questions and inspire us to think of our own questions! Once you have a question in mind, come see us in the learning commons! We can help you find resources and tools to investigate and present your findings!

We are on Facebook! We have 200+ "Likes" and we would love more! We are listed as "The International School at Thornton Middle-Library" I have been posting inspirational quotations, interesting articles, and relevant images to school and learning....and still to come...the Staff Ice Bucket Challenge video! This is a fun way to connect with us online! Hope to see you there!

One last thing! Is there a book you want to read that we don't have? Please let us know and we can check it out! Use this form to give us your input and we will consider your request when making our next purchase!

Until our next update...keep on reading!