There's Never Nothing to Do with School Libraries

This Weekend, It's Word on the Street

WOTS: Sunday at Library Square, 11 am to 5 pm. This is a wonderful annual Fall event where you can check out new titles, award-winning authors and spoken-word artists, book bargains, and more ... all for FREE. Who's there? Check here.

Fall Book Harvest, October 16

North Vancouver City Library's Annual Fall Book Harvest brings CWILLBC authors and illustrators, new titles, book prizes, displays, and the chance to meet children's favorites. 1:30 to 3:30 pm, 120 West 14th, North Vancouver.

Vancouver Children's Literature Roundtable Fall Breakfast

Saturday, October 17: University Golf Club, 8:30 Registration: This year, meet Gregory Maguire, author of more than a dozen novels for children -- and Wicked for adults.

BCTLA Conference: Champions of Literacy

October 22-23: Richmond Olympic Oval and Richmond Secondary School. Keynote speaker: none other than Roch Carrier; a national treasure and a champion of Canadian culture. As a Canadian writer, he touched our hearts with books like La Guerre, Yes Sir! He was a director of the Canadian Council for the Arts from 1994 to 1997 and served as National Librarian of Canada from 1997 to 2004. Carrier is an ardent supporter of libraries and children's literacy.

The Thursday night wine and cheese will be at the Legacy Suite of the spectacular Richmond Olympic Oval so you can catch the Olympic excitement! Take a tour of this inspiring and innovative building and meet the Olympic Mascots! This year's themes are Imagination, Inspiration, and Information! Click on Venues or Presenters to get more details.
The main conference is being hosted by Richmond Secondary School, located at 7171 Minoru Blvd., Richmond BC, V6Y1Z3. There'll be exciting workshops, inspiring speakers and great literacy displays from a variety of vendors.

Register now!

DEAR, October 26

On Monday evening this week, Vancouver school trustees supported by District Management, unanimously supported a motion to endorse the annual Drop Everything and Read campaign in which, on October 26 National School Library Day, whole school communities drop everything and read for 20 minutes.

Under the guidance of BCTLA VP (Advocacy) Karen Lindsay, the BCTLA Executive successfully promoted this initiative to celebrate National School Library Day and were honoured nationally with the CASL/Angela Thacker Memorial Award. You should have received your poster for this year's event; it features a photo by BCTLA Exec member Al Smith from Kelowna.

Ideas for the celebration are wonderfully diverse. Last year's event featured prominent Vancouverites, authors, and school board officials reading to children. Then-Education Minister Shirley Bond got into the act as well, dropping what she was doing to read.

The support of our Trustees and District Management Team ensures our district's participation in this high-profile literacy promotion event. Many of our schools already have a daily sustained silent reading component. An added "celebration" of reading for National School Library Day, along with a vision that one day, all British Columbians -- all Canadians -- will "drop everything and read" to honour the importance of both school libraries and the importance of free voluntary reading remains before us. Ideally, all would include this reading daily as the research is clear: reading improves with reading and makes a significant difference in student success. For more, read Stephen Krashen, guru of free voluntary reading, in School Library Journal, 2006.

This event coincides with the IASL proclamation in 2008 that October is International School Library Month. This year's theme mirrors the 2009 Conference in Padua: School Libraries - The Big Picture.

Thanks, Jane, Val, et al, for your on-going and ready support. Let's get planning for the celebrations at schools and other education centres ....

Multivendor Display, November 4-5

Start planning for a half-day to peruse books from our various vendors at the Firefighters' Hall at Metrotown in Burnaby. Mark this on your calendar. New TLs are encouraged not to book for the first morning and to plan as well to attend Maryann's Selection and Acquisition workshop scheduled for the venue.

November 14-21, Canadian Children's Book Week

The Grade 1 (along with the children in their classes) TD Book Giveaway takes place during the TD-sponsored week, so plan now for this event. The books should be arriving in your schools this week. You can order kits. Check your numbers.

QUICK READINGS of INTEREST

Pass this blog or readings along to your administrator and/or staff and/or parents.

South African Children Push for School Libraries

Read about The New York Times article about the march of school children to remedy a failing school system for the least priviliged young citizens. “We want more information and knowledge,” said one young marcher for Equal Education who learns in an environment where access to school libraries and the desperate need for building repairs constrains students' learning.

Place Priority on Teaching Internet Skills

Kids may be more Internet savvy than ever before, but their ability to perform online research and evaluate Web sites remains weak. How can parents and teachers help? Read this.

Literacy Accountability in a New-Media Age

Paul Barnwell, in Education Week (September 22, 2009), points to the limitations of assessments that are "stuck on a notion of literacy that does not reflect the reality of our time." Our focus on testing students' understanding of print materials ignores the reality that they learn from new media and need to be able to read and think critically about text in relation to multimodal formats, that skills they develop can be transferred to understanding text in traditional formats, and that this is about empowering students. Writes Barnwell, "Unleashing and teaching media skills results in student empowerment. This is scary to some, who are comfortable sorting students by their ability to perform traditional literacy tasks.These same students might be effective media consumers and producers, but not according to our current accountability system."

At The End of the Week

I believe I am about to return to a life of normalcy. I am on my first day off today since mid-August. This weekend was the BCTLA Executive where we welcomed new members Michele and Chris, both of whom are perfect "fits" for this wonderful group.

This week as well some of us gathered to say farewell to the retiring "super" Chris Kelly; he has always been a wonderful participant in and supporter of our programs. Who can forget his readings about love at last year's Winter Tonic. I thanked him for "the party," as his leadership has been uplifting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking.

Meeting Reminders: We hope to see lots of you at

• Kerrisdale on Wednesday this week for TL Studio 1 (the season opener)
• Hamber on Thursday at 4 pm for the AGM of the VTLA
• for secondary TLs, the first meeting is on Monday, October 5, 4 pm, Hamber.

See you there!

Lots on Literacy

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A TOUGH BEGINNING
BY DARAH HANSEN VANCOUVER SUN
The Vancouver Sun, 20 Sep 2008

Johnny Romah was 17 on his very first day of school. A member of the Montagnard — or mountain — people of Vietnam, Romah arrived in Vancouver in 2005 after an exhausting year spent in a refugee camp in Cambodia. He’d fled his impoverished village at...read more...

Why we do what we do ...

If you attended the VTLA meeting, you would have heard Denise from Killarney tell us a little more about her first meeting Johnny at Tupper, after he had attended Gladstone. His striving for confidence and competence in his new language is propelled by his digital confidence and new-found skills with technology. These technologies he has learned to use are the tools that have opened the doors to knowledge, reading, learning, and friendship for Johnny.

The support and caring of Vancouver educators such as Denise and the vision and leadership of our ESL colleagues like Sylvia cannot be underestimated in stories such as these either. Of course, we know that great things are happening in school libraries; for many of our students, they are sources of lifelines and the tools for navigating the very complicated terrain of school.

Raise-a-Reader Grants

Val H posted the Ministry Press Release on Canwest's Raise-a-Reader campaign to the BCTLA Forum this week:

For the fifth consecutive year, the Province will match all donations raised during CanWest's Raise-a-Reader campaign in B.C., Premier Gordon Campbell announced today. "Literacy is a key that opens the door to a world of knowledge, of learning and of opportunity," said Premier Campbell .... "Our government's commitment to improved literacy levels through initiatives like Raise-A-Reader is leading the country," said Education Minister Shirley Bond. "Partners like CanWest help us support children and adults and increase awareness about the need to raise literacy levels."

"Literacy involves continuous learning and enables us to reach our goals, develop our knowledge and achieve our potential," said Kevin Bent, president and publisher of the Vancouver Sun .... Since the inception of the campaign in Vancouver in 1997, Raise-a-Reader and its sponsors have made significant contributions to help improve literacy for children and families not only across the province, but also across Canada.

In response Karen Lindsay, BCTLA VP (Advocacy), posted: "I always apply for a Raise-a-Reader grant through the Victoria Times-Colonist, and get between $2,000 and $3,000. The fact that school library programs are not mentionned in this press release does not mean that schools do not apply or benefit. It's a great program with many beneficiaries."

Applications for school libraries are made through the Superintendents' offices in BC. If your school library program does not benefit from fund-raising, here's a great way to put more resources on the shelves for some of our neediest young readers.

Resources, Resources, Resources ...

Maryann and I presented to Learning Services this week and highlighted the importance of our centralized services for schools, including the Professional collections! We are encouraging everyone distributing resources in schools to see our wonderful staff in MLST first and to think school library and media services for retention, circulation, and promotion. There was great interest in the newspapers and the databases.

We are all working to build the information literate educational community ... here, we are helping our district colleagues move comfortably in and out of the webcat page to give them more teaching and learning resources to put into the hands of teachers; this important network in Learning Services are an important source of support for classrooms and school library programs.

I am looking forward to seeing the work that Mark is doing to promote these resources with his colleagues at Cunningham as well ... he`s using Inspiration!

Upcoming Events Reminders

• Will we see you on Sunday (September 28) at the Word on the Street , Library Square, 11 am to 5 pm?
  
• On Monday look for the FAXed flyer sent to your attention about the event sponsored by the BC Coalition for School Libraries/CWILL BC , Kidsbooks, and the VPL called "Autumn Harvest." It will be held on Sunday, from 1:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. at the Central branch of the VPL in the Alice MacKay room (lower level). Admission is free. Details of how to enter the contest for an author visit for your school are on the flyer.
  
• Have you registered yet for the PSA Conference on Friday, October 24: BCTLA Conference in Victoria -- Mission: Literacy. If you need a ride or want to share accommodations, check the email discussions.

Keep up the good work, everyone!

Great Initiative ... lots going on here!

Short and sweet will be my blog this week (yeah, right!) ... I am late in getting this out despite goals for Friday publishings but have been driven these first few weeks by a frying agenda of meetings and workshops and planning. I am just off this Saturday morning to the BCTLA Executive retreat. It will be so nice when September is over!

NOTE: Please check the posting from last week -- I have added some new dates based on information received from many of you, and thanks for these updates. Again, I would encourage you to use the comment feature of the blog to have direct input to this flow of information.

Needless to say, I am as ever amazed by the professional energies of our Vancouver TLs! We are getting lots of feedback on school-based efforts to promote the electronic resources and The Vancouver Sun and Province subscriptions. You are actively engaging in the challenge to expand the resource "horizons" of our teacher colleagues and in constructing an "information literate educational community" for Vancouver educators.

From Bill Raikes:

I really enjoyed the Update session last Thursday. I can see how I can increase my value as a teacher librarian. I loaded Webcat into all my staff's BCeSIS computers and showed them how to use it .... BCeSIS has forced [our colleagues] to become more familiar with computers and I decided to strike while the iron is hot. This week I am teaching myself how to access and navigate many of the databases in Webcat. I plan to introduce my staff to a new database every fortnight or so. I don't want to overload them. I am [also] pushing for Smartboards as the possibilities seem endless.

I mentioned Bill's great idea about the webcat link and database promotion to John Hunter who immediately saw the possibilities for promoting electronic and print resources in the district. John is the administrator for BCeSIS implementation. Thanks to Bill and John, every teacher will automatically have the Webcat link on their BCeSIS interface, and you in the pilot schools will have a new way to promote the use of resources. How's that for great initiative.

Email received from Christianne Hayward about upcoming professional development at Christianne's Lyceum of Literature and Art (3696 W 8th Ave, Vancouver):

Thank-you very much for taking the time to help us get news out about our PD workshops. [Here's the] link on our website that allows interested parties to download the pdf .... Thanks again - I hope your fall is a fruitful one, Christianne Hayward

News on recent Ministry-released resources:

• The DVD The Boy Inside will be catalogued and sent out to our high school libraries. This is a thought-provoking documentary about a young boy with autism. If your elementary school has need of a copy for professional development, there will be addtional copies added to the district media collection or you can ask to have one sent for your own collections as well.
  
• Soon to arrive in schools will be the beautiful specially-commissioned book British Columbia: Spirit of the People by Jean Barman. With any luck at all, we can divert these to our media and library cataloguing services first ... but do let your administrator (or school secretary) know that, if the book and stamp arrive there, you would be the best and first place to send this resource to ensure its retention and circulation in the school.

From Margaret at Van Tech comes a reminder of the annual Word on the Street (WOTS)event to be held next Sunday, September 28, from 11 am to 5 pm. Get there early to get your pass and bag for "freebies" at the displays. Promotional materials will arrive in the first media bag delivery at your schools this week. Please share the information with interested staff ... and maybe put a notice out in the daily bulletin. Here's a list of some of the authors and literary notables you will find there:

Caroline Adderson, Peter Bagge, Linda Bailey, Jean Barman, Michael Byers, Norma Charles, Lisa Cinar, Ian Ferguson, Steven Galloway, James Glave, Garry Gottfriedson, Robert Heidbreder, Lee Henderson, Deborah Hodge, Stephen Hume, Mel Hurtig, Susan Juby, Hadrien Laroche, Mark Leiren-Young, Adrienne Mason, Dr. Gabor Maté, George McWhirter, Susin Nielsen, Kathryn Shoemaker, George Stanley, Meg Tilly, Karen X. Tulchinsky, Richard Wagamese, Howard White, John Wilson, and Michael Yahgulanaas.

Have a great week, everyone.