AASL released its list of Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learning 2021! This year’s list took into special consideration how well these tools work for remote/distance students. The resources enhance learning and encourage the following qualities:
Innovation/Creativity
Active Participation
Collaboration
User-Friendly
Encourages Exploration
Information/Reference
We share these resources every year and you can explore our archive of past recommendations here.
If you love using Overdrive to check out ebooks and audiobooks from your library, Sora is the version for students!
“The Sora app allows learners to access popular and educational ebooks and audiobooks on any device from any location. Sora allows school librarians to curate their own collections and change the titles during the school year to align with their school’s curriculum and students’ needs. Sora also enables school librarians to support all kinds of readers by providing access to graphic novels and audiobooks paired with text. Sora also enhances reading with a dyslexic font as well as highlights and notes features students can use to complete their tasks.”
If you love MN books as much as we do, this is the holiday gift guide for you. The University of Minnesota Press has books from a great variety of genres: children’s books, environmental, memoir, travel guides, natural history, cookbooks, and more. And they’ve gathered them up for you here in this lovely little guide. Check your local library if you want a physical copy or read it online here. I know it instantly gave me plenty of gift ideas as well as titles to add to my TBR! (Plus, right now, you can get 30% off! No, this is isn’t a sponsored post, we’re just excited about MN books 🙂 ).
Some books we’re excited to read:
Yang Warriors by Kao Kalia Yang, illustrated by Billy Thao “In this inspiring picture book, fierce and determined children confront the hardships of Ban Vinai refugee camp, where Kao Kalia Yang lived as a child. Accompanied by the evocative and rich cultural imagery of debut illustrator Billy Thao, the warriors’ secret mission shows what feats of compassion and courage children can perform, bringing more than foraged greens back to the younger children and to their elders. In this unforgiving place, with little to call their own, these children are the heroes, offering gifts of hope and belonging in a truly unforgettable way.”
A Natural Curiosity: The Story of the Bell Museum by Lansing Shepard, Don Luce, Barbara Coffin, and Gwen Schagrin “A richly illustrated tour of Minnesota’s premier natural history museum after 150 years. Since its humble start in 1872 as a one-room cabinet of curiosities, the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of natural history has become one of the state’s most important cultural institutions. Drawing on a wealth of materials unearthed during the museum’s recent move, this gorgeously illustrated book chronicles the remarkable discoveries and personalities that have made the Bell Museum what it is today.”
Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask: Anishinaabe Botanical Teachings by Mary Siisip Geniusz “The first complete resource for the practical use of plants in the Anishinaabe culture and the stories that surround them In Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask Mary Siisip Geniusz makes Anishinaabe botanical information available to native and nonnative healers and educators and emphasizes the Anishinaabe culture that developed the knowledge and practice. Teaching the way she was taught—through stories—Geniusz brings the plants to life with narratives that explain their uses, meaning, and history.”
Waterfall: A Novel by Mary Casanova “Trinity Baird’s hope for independence is tenuous, especially when her family has the final say—and the power to lock her away. In her third Rainy Lake historical drama, Mary Casanova takes us back to pristine and rugged northern Minnesota. Informed by historical figures, by the burgeoning growth of women’s rights in the early twentieth century, and the complicated issue of mental illness and how “difficult” women were silenced, Waterfall offers a compelling story of a young woman’s fight to find her way.”
The Steger Homestead Kitchen: Simple Recipes for an Abundant Life by Will Steger and Rita Mae Steger with Beth Dooley “Personal and simple, earthy and warm—recipes and stories from the Steger Wilderness Center in Minnesota’s north woods. This is an inspiring and down-to-earth collection of meals and memories gathered at the Homestead, the home of Arctic explorer and environmental activist Will Steger, located in Minnesota’s north woods. Interwoven with dozens of mouth-watering recipes—for simple, hearty meals shared around home chefs’ own homestead tables—are Steger’s exhilarating stories of epic adventures exploring the Earth’s most remote regions.”
Even when life is (relatively) more normal, helping keep your students and/or kids current with their reading skills over summer break can be a challenge! We’ll share some ideas here and link to articles with helpful suggestions. When all else fails, maybe suggest a reading picnic, with treats involved! 😊📚🌳
Some favorite ideas:
Of course, your local library probably usually has a great summer reading program. Check with them to see if they have made alternative plans for this year.
Write a letter to your child, student, or young reader in your life and send it in the mail! Getting mail is exciting!
Family reading time (can do this over Zoom, too!) Everyone grab a book or magazine and spend 10-30 minutes reading together. Or, if you have very small readers, let them see you reading. They will probably want to “borrow” the book you are finding so interesting.
Build a book nook! Use pillows, blankets, a real tent, whatever you can find, to create a cozy fort just for reading!
Links to helpful articles:
This one from Reading Rockets about encouraging summer reading
Each week we assemble a collection – a bouquet, if you will – of books you can read for yourself, or use to build into a display in your library. As always, the books we link to have info from Amazon.com. If you click a link and then buy anything at all from Amazon, we get a small percent of their profits from your sale. Yay!!! Thanks!!! We really appreciate the assistance! 💕😊
Reading friends, library friends, new friends, best friends – we love them all! Here are some reading suggestions for all ages featuring friendships.
How to Grow a Friend by Sara Gillingham “A lovely metaphor teaches valuable lessons in how to treat others and make friendships blossom! Making a friend takes patience, care, and room to bloom—just like growing a flower. Soon your little gardeners will have their very own green thumbs for this most important of life skills.”
Margaret and Margarita by Lynn Reiser “Margaret speaks English but not Spanish. Margarita speaks Spanish but not English. Can they still play? Of course they can! Join two robust girls who aren’t about to let anything spoil their fun.”
The Princess in Black and the Mysterious Playdate by Shannon Hale “Princess Magnolia and Princess Sneezewort have plans . . . mysterious plans, like a princess playdate! They dress-up slam! They karaoke jam! They playhouse romp and snack-time stomp! But then a shout from outside Princess Sneezewort’s castle interrupts their fun. It’s a monster trying to eat someone’s kitty! This is a job for the Princess in Black. Yet when the Princess in Black gets there, she finds only a masked stranger and no monster in sight . . . or is there? Action and humor abound in this ode to friendship that proves that when shape-shifting monsters intrude on your plans, two heroes are better than one.”
Things Seen From Above by Shelley Pearsall “April is looking for an escape from the sixth-grade lunch hour, which has become a social-scene nightmare, so she signs up to be a “buddy bench monitor” for the fourth graders’ recess. Joey Byrd is a boy on the fringes, who wanders the playground alone, dragging his foot through the dirt. But over time, April realizes that Joey isn’t just making random circles. When you look at his designs from above, a story emerges… Joey’s “bird’s eye” drawings reveal what he observes and thinks about every day. Told in alternating viewpoints–April’s in text and Joey’s mostly in art–the story gives the “whole picture” of what happens as these two outsiders find their rightful places.”
Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo “Raymie Clarke has come to realize that everything, absolutely everything, depends on her. And she has a plan. If Raymie can win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition, then her father, who left town two days ago with a dental hygienist, will see Raymie’s picture in the paper and (maybe) come home. To win, not only does Raymie have to do good deeds and learn how to twirl a baton; she also has to contend with the wispy, frequently fainting Louisiana Elefante, who has a show-business background, and the fiery, stubborn Beverly Tapinski, who’s determined to sabotage the contest. But as the competition approaches, loneliness, loss, and unanswerable questions draw the three girls into an unlikely friendship — and challenge each of them to come to the rescue in unexpected ways.”
Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson “Running into a long-ago friend sets memories from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them. But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.”
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey “Bombay, 1921: Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes her especially devoted to championing and protecting women’s rights. Mistry Law is handling the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen goes through the papers, she notices something strange: all three have signed over their inheritance to a charity. What will they live on if they forfeit what their husband left them? Perveen is suspicious.”
The Burning Girl by Claire Messud “Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship. The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality—crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence.”
Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan “A sparkling debut novel: a tender story of friendship, a witty take on liberal arts colleges, and a fascinating portrait of the first generation of women who have all the opportunities in the world, but no clear idea about what to choose. Assigned to the same dorm their first year at Smith College, Celia, Bree, Sally, and April couldn’t have less in common. Celia, a lapsed Catholic, arrives with her grandmother’s rosary beads in hand and a bottle of vodka in her suitcase; beautiful Bree pines for the fiancé she left behind in Savannah; Sally, pristinely dressed in Lilly Pulitzer, is reeling from the loss of her mother; and April, a radical, redheaded feminist wearing a “Riot: Don’t Diet” T-shirt, wants a room transfer immediately.”
This is a guest post from Karen Miller, school librarian at Bertha-Hewitt School. Want to read more about the exciting materials our members have purchased with their mini grants? Read past mini grant reports here.
I first would like to say thank you for accepting my grant submission! I purchased 5 book series for our school library.
I had a 6th grader read the first book from each series and give an “advertisement” for their book during Character Building which is a program for K-6 that happens every Friday morning. They presented their advertisement and they all were very happy with the book series they chose.
The most exciting thing to me was all my library classes on Friday as the kids came in they asked to check these books out! I actually have a waiting list on a couple of the series that have to be read in order.
I think it made a difference to have students present to their peers with their book reviews. That is exactly what I was hoping would happen after doing this!
Now I am hoping to do book “advertisements” monthly with different books in our library. Sometimes that is all it takes to get students interested in different genres that they might not normally read.
Some of the students who volunteered to do the advertisements were not ones I thought would be interested in it. So it also was a huge learning experience for me!
Once again I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity!
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