Tag Archives: Resources

General, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist

Read 1,000 books before kindergarten!

Early literacy and love of reading is so important, and has lifelong benefits for young readers. In order to encourage this, libraries and parents can participate in the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten program! Reading 1,000 books sounds impressive, and it definitely is! But as their website explains, it’s completely achievable:

“Read a book (any book) to your newborn, infant, and/or toddler. The goal is to have read 1,000 books (yes you can repeat books) before your precious one starts kindergarten. Does it sound hard? Not really if you think about it. If you read just 1 book a night, you will have read about 365 books in a year. That is 730 books in two years and 1,095 books in three years. If you consider that most children start kindergarten at around 5 years of age, you have more time than you think (so get started).”

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General, Public, School Media Specialist

ELL students learn literacy with help from photography

Use photos to help students learning English

At CMLE, we know for our member libraries (and for most libraries) assisting those who are learning English can be an important part of their job! Check out our previous post about the great work taking place at the Long Prairie branch.

This article from Edutopia discusses how photography can help students with their literacy. It includes reference to Wendy Ewald who has done extensive work on the subject. By learning to verbally reflect on and analyze photos, students get used to organizing their thoughts, a skill which translates well to writing.

There are five strategies that use photography to help develop literacy skills:

  • Focus – students notice details and describe what they are seeing
  • Portraits – the article shares several different exercises that utilize portraits, like learning about camera angle and the intention of the photographer in taking the portrait
  • Building Vocabulary and Using Evidence – using a photograph from a past time period, have students list the things they notice, and use this evidence to draw conclusions about when the photo was taken, who the people were, how they were feeling
  • Perspective Taking – students photograph an object from several different angles and notice the effect that the angle has on the tone of the photograph.
  • Telling a Story – students each take a picture they feel tells a story, then trade photos with a partner, who then interpret for themselves the story being told. Students can discuss their interpretations, and eventually, write them out.
Academic, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Special

Grant writing resources

Mcol money bagEveryone likes grant money! It’s great to have money for your neat projects, to try new things, or to bring some special services to your patrons!

But if you have not done much grant writing, just getting started can be a big challenge. Grants are not hard to write, and some basic ideas to follow can help you to get things started for your library.

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Academic, Communication, Guest Blogger, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Special

Creative Commons Part 2: Five Creative Commons Resources

Creative Commons

CMLE Guest Blogger: Carli Spina If you have any questions, let me know in the comments or contact me on Twitter where I’m @CarliSpina.

In my last post, I explained what Creative Commons licenses are. But how can you make use of these licenses and incorporate items that are licensed under them in your library? Perhaps not surprisingly, an array of resources have emerged to make it approachable to use Creative Commons licenses and to aggregate Creative Commons-licensed items. The resources suggested below are not the only ones available on this topic, but hopefully they will help to get you started with a variety of Creative Commons resources.

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Academic, Check this out:, Public, Resources, School Media Specialist, Special, Training

Do you have training materials to share??

training
let’s share training!

Help!

At CMLE Headquarters we are working to assemble all kinds of library information you can use as you reach out to your communities. We have plans for all kinds of things, and are already working to add more material to our website so it will be useful to you. This collection of information will be one of the benefits of belonging to the CMLE system; so you can let us know what kind of information would be helpful to you!

One project we are starting is collecting training material on using online resources.We want to have this all in one handy spot, so when you need material on a resource you do not know, or when someone new joins a library, or you want to give instructions to patrons who are remote, nobody has to recreate things from scratch that already exist.

Have you used, or created, some training material that really worked for your patrons? We would love it if you shared it with us, so we could share it around the system! Do you have links to material already out there on the Web? Send them to us!

We are looking for training materials from all types of libraries across the system. An advantage to being part of a multi-type system is that we have similar needs, and approach them in different ways. That kind of perspective can be helpful to everyone else, as we work to improve our training for patrons!

You can send ideas, Office documents of all sorts, links to good training, names of people who know good things about our online resources, and anything else you have to share to us: admin@cmle.org.

Thanks for your help!