Kurz vor dem Urlaub...

The blog is going on vacation! I’ll be away for three weeks and instead of thinking about libraries, I’ll be browsing through books.

Right before vacation (two more hours…) I’m clearing out (read: catching up on) my RSS feeds, and have come across an article by Amy Bowllan that I very much enjoyed. She suggests as a lesson plan for the school library the topic, “Michael Jackson Wanted to be White?" Her lesson plan not only provides a good opportunity to work with the library’s materials and data banks and to review the relevance of sources, it is also a wonderful introduction to critical thinking.

Another example, which for some reason made the rounds in a couple of sessions at the ALA Conference, was a lesson plan for the school library in which students choose one of the Greek gods, (who, as is well-known, perpetrated practically every offense one can imagine, from adultery to murder) and, in the role of either defender or prosecutor, conduct the case according to the laws of the state in which the students live. The research, of course, is to be carried out in the school library.

School libraries, German readers will quickly note, obviously play a totally different role in the United States than in Germany.

Currently, I’m preparing for the stay of our two Librarians in Residence this fall. But planning for the theme of our 2010 Librarians in Residence program also has begun, and at the moment everyone involved in the project can well imagine a project that focuses on school libraries…
Have a great summer!