Welcome back to school, Halton Hills Christian School community! It was so great last week to see the students come back to class after 6 months of being away for distance learning and summer break. I am Mrs. Baillargeon and I am the HHCS Teacher-Librarian. I am excited for a new school year and I am looking forward to writing this blog!
Here throughout the year you will find: resources for helping your children to find books that they will love, information about various authors, information about what is happening in the world of children’s literature, pictures of school reading events and classes, articles about digital and media literacy, and more! Please feel free to comment below and I look forward to being a support for all of our school families.
You’ll notice the “moose” theme on this blog- last spring we were excited to premiere HHCS’s new school mascot- Bruce the Moose!
While we cannot do our regular school library checkout this year, we have adapted our routine for 2020/21. Homeroom teachers will take bins of books that they have chosen for their classroom, and then the students will be able to choose and read from that limited selection. Please refer to your child’s homeroom teacher for the exact specifics. We will be running the AR program this year but will adjust the settings so that students can read from a more broad reading level range, since our access to books will be more limited this year because of Covid.
I will be teaching in some of your children’s classes. For the classes involved, I am teaching a class that I am calling “Information Literacy“. This class will look slightly different at each level but in general this class will be a combination of 4 different areas:
–library skills and special topics (taking care of books, parts of a book, how to find books in the library, Dewey Decimal, book genres, Black History Month, Women’s History month, etc)
- research skills (creating inquiry questions, plagiarism, note-taking, using reliable websites, effective search terms, graphic organizers…)
- digital literacy (finding balance in using technology, digital footprint, cyberbullying, credible news)
- media literacy ( bias, Purpose and audience of media texts, interpreting messages, media conventions and techniques, produce and reflect on a variety of media texts)
As we come back to school in this time of Covid, I will be spending some time in class with read-alouds on this topic. I thought that you as parents might be interested in looking for some of these books to have at home:
I hope that you found some of this information here helpful! Looking forward to this new school year with our UNSTOPPABLE GOD! You will see this theme often in our school communications this year!
“Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.” — Kate DiCamillo
