Creative Collaborations in the Library

 

AASL Shared Foundations Blog Series – Collaborate

This blog is the third in a series of blogs that discuss a variety of the shared foundations that SC librarians find are important in their school libraries.  

This librarian is Kristi.  She is the librarian at a 600 student elementary school.  Her library is an integral part of her school.  She works diligently to provide opportunities to challenge learners and partner with other educators to scaffold learning.  A few of those lessons are weather with second grade students and a science ecosystem web quest with fifth grade students.

The weather unit combines a read aloud of the book, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, discussion about the types of severe weather, and research using online websites.  The students are given a graphic organizer to provide scaffolding when working in small groups to document their research about a specific severe weather.  The summation of this collaborate lesson is for students to be filmed being a meteorologist and giving a weather report.  They worked in groups to provide peer editing of their weather report according to standards created by Kristi and the classroom teacher. 

This fifth grade web quest collaboration incorporated the librarian’s domains of leading inquiry-based learning opportunities and demonstrating the idea that information is a shared resource.  The use of the SC Discus website to research the information requires students to access the shared resources provided to SC students for research.  This project included 10 tasks for students to complete while working in pairs.  Students were required to use multi-medias to complete the tasks.  The entire activities were standard-based according to SC science standards for fifth grade. 

The challenge Kristi finds in is scheduling time with teachers to collaborate.  The typical librarian’s schedule is based on a related arts schedule for the school.  This leaves very little time for the librarian to meet with teachers to develop and implement a collaborative lesson. Kristi provides opportunities for student collaboration in the library as often possible during lesson time.  This allows learners to work productively and learn to understand diverse perspectives during their own inquiry process.