3 Myths About Libraries, Makerspaces and Books Even though they’ve been around since 2013, school library makerspaces still have a lot of misunderstandings surrounding them. This confusion can come from administrators, teachers, students and the librarians themselves. Unfortunately, believing these myths can often cause decisions to be made about libraries that are detrimental to the … Read more
You can’t design a library space and program that meets the needs of your teachers and students if you don’t know what those needs are. It’s hard to develop an effective library collection if you have no idea what genres and books your students want to read. Using surveys with your teachers and students can … Read more
How I Organized My Fiction Collection by Genre At the end of the 2017-2018 school year, I genrefied my school’s fiction collection. This section of the collection is relatively small at the moment (about 2,000 books). I intend to grow it a lot, so it made sense to me to get started in my first … Read more
Frank Lloyd Wright, Blocks and Play (Post contains affiliate links.) On a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, we enter a large room – a sort of study combined with library and a tall ceiling. This was a room for entertaining guests, the children, relaxing in the evening. There’s several built … Read more
Good signage is vital in a learning space. Ideally, your students should be able to walk into your space, look around, and find the things that they need without having to ask for help. Realistically, I know that this isn’t usually what happens, but it’s the goal to aim for. In general, I would say … Read more
Read This Book: The Design of Childhood I first heard about The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids in a NPR interview with the author. It immediately piqued my interest. Design, education and learning spaces are some of my favorite subjects. Bringing them all together in one book sounds amazing. And … Read more
Our libraries are no longer solely the silent, individual study zones that they used to be. More and more schools are recognizing the value of collaboration, and the library can be the perfect place to support it. But traditional library environments (think heavy wooden individual tables, tall, imposing stacks, etc) don’t really provide a collaborative … Read more
When I first started my makerspace at Stewart, I had no idea what I was doing. I just had three bins of K’nex and a vision for what our makerspace could be. Shortly after we got our supplies, we began 6th grade clubs that met during school. I started the K’nex club. The next year … Read more
I don’t normally review fiction on my blog, but Click’d ties in beautifully with makerspaces and would be a fantastic addition to your library. Here’s why: Read this Book: Click’d (Post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase using them, I get a small commission that helps support running this blog) Allie Navarro loves to … Read more
I love all forms of making. Coding robots, building circuits, soldering things to make stuff light up. Knitting, sewing, crafting, tinkering, taking what looks like a pile of junk and turning it into something amazing. But sadly, many in education see a distinction between these two types of making. In Defense of Craft, Play and … Read more