Category Archives: General

General, School Media Specialist

AASL Recommended App: Books: Metamorphabet

metamorphabetIn June 2016, the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) announced their 25 Best Apps for Teaching and Learning. The apps encourage qualities such as innovation and active participation, and are user-friendly.

Metamorphabet is an app that makes the alphabet come to life! Using animation, letters are able to morph into images that portray vocabulary words. This engaging alphabet book could also be used with ELL to build and develop vocabulary.

Check out reviews of the app from Common Sense Education here. School Library Journal shares their thoughts and examples from the app in this article.

Cost: $3.99

Level: Elementary
Platforms: iOS and Android

Watch the trailer here:

Books, General, Public, School Media Specialist

Books in the Spotlight: March

Sometimes CMLE will highlight several books that have some factor in common. We hope they will give you ideas for your collection, or influence an activity, lesson plan, or display!

This month, we are sharing several different books that have main characters that model good qualities for young readers. This book list began as a discussion from a librarian hoping to help one of her patrons. The patron was looking for suggestions of beginning chapter books for a nine-year-old that contained characters that modeled qualities such as dependability, good time management, etc but without being didactic.

Here are some of the suggestions other librarians came up with:

Continue reading Books in the Spotlight: March →

Books, General, School Media Specialist

Book Pirates help early literacy

Don’t mess with the Book Pirates! The name sounds tough, but this organization has a great goal in mind, and works to promote literacy with kids.

This article from the LITA Blog introduces the “Book Pirates,” or as they are called in their native Germany, “Buecherpiraten.” The goal of the Pirates is to “use the combined powers of digital publishing and self publishing to empower children and young people ages 3 to 19 to tell their own story, in their own mother tongue.”

Kids (of all ages!) can make their own picture book with artwork and stories which gets published on the Book Pirates website. Then, the book is available for free download in first and second language of choice, and can be created into several different formats (tablet, regular book, etc).

It makes sense that this program has been very successful with refugee children. It provides a place to tell their story, which can then be read in their native language, as well as in their new language.

You can make your own picture book, become a translator, or just get more information by visiting their website.

Communication, General

Notable Date to Celebrate: March 16th is Freedom of Information Day

You probably already know that at CMLE, we offer a service called “Notable Dates for your Noggin” which feature special holidays and birthdays of authors, as well as publications of well-known books. In an effort to help you get more from this service, we’ve decided to select one “Notable Date” each month to feature. We will include a few fun programming and activity ideas too, all for you to use!

Thursday, March 16th is Freedom of Information Day!

“Freedom of Information (FOI) Day is an annual event on or near March 16, the birthday of James Madison, who is widely regarded as the Father of the Constitution and as the foremost advocate for openness in government.”

Make sure to check out all the resources from ALA about this important day. You can sign up for ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom newsletter here, which contains a ton of information including censorship, privacy, academic freedom, and First Amendment issues.

Learn more about the history of Freedom of Information Day and find lessons plans and activities here.

Books, General

A librarian’s reaction to the Oscar’s mix-up

If you were watching the Oscars last Sunday, or even just tuning into the news regarding the Oscars, chances are you heard about the major mix-up in which the movie La La Land was announced as the winner of the Best Picture award – when in reality the winner was Moonlight.

People reacted with surprise, shock, etc but the best reaction definitely came from a librarian, of course! She chose three picture books with fitting titles to explain the situation – check out the article from MPR here. 

(Platteville Library, the originator of the Tweet, favorited our Twitter response! Talking with library people, on social media, on blogs, and in person, is always fun!)