Tag: literacy

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After reading Reading and Writing: The Golden Ticket, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on my role as both teacher-librarian and Literacy Lead in my job.  The article is very stimulating if you’ve got a minute. I really felt motivated by the article from the Globe and Mail, and although I know this course […]

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The Bear by Claire Cameron My rating: 4 of 5 stars The UGDSB has just chosen this book as our board-wide novel for secondary students and author Ms. Cameron will be visiting schools in May 2015. After reading this terrifying novel, I am nervous about the problematic areas in Cameron’s choices. As a parent, I […]

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My White Pine book club is growing stale. The same few students join every year (which is awesome) but I’m not reaching as far as I’d like to in my secondary school of 1200 students. So I’m trying an additional book club this year in a different format. The book I’ve chosen is “This Dark […]

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The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan My rating: 5 of 5 stars Recent winner of the Ontario Library Association’s Evergreen fiction for 2014, Cathy Marie Buchanan transported me to another place and time with this story of sisters surviving all the odds against them in 1880s Paris. I love it when a book prompts […]

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The Silent Summer of Kyle McGinley by Jan Andrews My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is my first read of the 2014-15 Ontario Library Association’s White Pine picks for this year and based on this book alone, I’m very hopeful. Like last year’s Old Man by David A. Poulsen, our main character Kyle McGinley […]

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Jenkins and Kelley offer an optimistic alternative to Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains which is filled, as Jenkins claims, with “contemporary anxieties” (p. 10).  The book offers instead this explanation: “As a society, we are still sorting through the long-term implications of these [media] changes.  But one thing is […]

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Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden My rating: 5 of 5 stars Boyden allowed me to feel that I had been to Moose Factory and felt the complicated nuances of self-government and survival that happen there. And yet it’s a wonderful modern mystery as we try to understand what has happened to Suzanne and we […]

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When Nicholas Carr wrote the infamous article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008), he made waves in the education community who had bought into the Marc Prensky vision of today’s students as “digital natives” (2005).  While making impetuous decisions about technology integration in schools, Carr halted everyone into thinking maybe we should be a bit […]

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I submitted this paper today in fulfillment of the requirements for my M.Ed. INTRODUCTION From curious to competitive  I always felt most comfortable working with students in portfolio courses where students knew what they needed to accomplish and had ample opportunity to do and re-do their assignments until they were satisfied.  I came into being […]

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In this article Martha Cornog, longtime reviewer for Library Journal, interviews Graterford Corrections librarian, Philip Ephraim, about the inclusion of comics in his prison library.  Ephraim talks about the circulation statistics of comics noting that they are a small portion of the collection but well-used by patrons.    As a result, Ephraim has observed an increase […]

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So many of the changes in our library, representing the new Ontario School Library Association’s document Together for Learning, are fundamentally shifting how we see popular culture’s role in education. The document recognizes the need for social networking and meeting the students where they are whether interested in graphic novels, anime or gaming. I allow gaming […]

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I remember distinctly my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Phillips, standing over me saying “Are you reading?” I was reading, of course.  Things are fuzzy now but I know the book involved some kind of abbreviated fairy tale with a well and wishes.  Then we had the principal, Mr. Henderson come down and I read a few […]

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