Standard 2
Literacy and Reading
Candidates promote reading for learning, personal growth, and enjoyment. Candidates are aware of major trends in children's and young adult literature and select reading materials in multiple formats to support reading for information, reading for pleasure, and reading for lifelong learning. Candidates use a variety of strategies to reinforce classroom reading instruction to address the diverse needs and interests of all readers.
Literacy and Reading
Candidates promote reading for learning, personal growth, and enjoyment. Candidates are aware of major trends in children's and young adult literature and select reading materials in multiple formats to support reading for information, reading for pleasure, and reading for lifelong learning. Candidates use a variety of strategies to reinforce classroom reading instruction to address the diverse needs and interests of all readers.
Standard 2 Reflection
Literacy and Reading
I consider myself an avid reader who enjoys books from many different types of genres. It is essential to maintain a collection that is diverse and appealing to my students, as well as relevant to their curricular needs. The best resource of recommendations for young adult books, I have found, is my students. I have a panel of fifteen readers, representing all grade levels, who have different genre preferences and who assist me when I am creating a book order. They inform me of their interests, and together we go through titles and series. Then I check reviews from such selection tools as Booklist, Choice Review Online, and School Library Journal to ensure that we are adding quality resources to the collection. Finally, I seek input from our teachers, because they often know of resources that would be of value to our collection since they are aware of students’ interests and needs as well. Through this process, we compile our books orders. Because we purchase fiction materials with the patrons in mind, there has been a steady increase in the number of books checked out during the past two years. Students from all grade and intellectual levels and from a wide range of interests are flooding into the media center daily to check out books.
When I first began working in the Windsor Forest High School Media Center six years ago, I saw an immediate need to weed numerous books from the collection. For a school with a little more than 1000 students, the library housed almost 30, 000 titles, many dating back to the 1970’s and before. In the course of four years, I was able to weed almost 20, 000 titles from the collection. I offered the books to teachers and students before sending the remaining ones to our local Humane Society, who picks them up from the school for free and sells them to raise money for the local animal shelter. For FRIT 7332, I created a collection evaluation and weeding plan for the career section in our media center. This section was a stand-alone section within the shelves of books that students rarely visited. I weeded the books that were considered to be aged and irrelevant, and then I disposed of the career section altogether, shelving the books back into the appropriate non-fiction categories. I am currently in the process of rebuilding the collection of books in the media center. This is a slow process due to budget restraints, but it is imperative that this media center never becomes just a warehouse for aging books.
Literacy and Reading
I consider myself an avid reader who enjoys books from many different types of genres. It is essential to maintain a collection that is diverse and appealing to my students, as well as relevant to their curricular needs. The best resource of recommendations for young adult books, I have found, is my students. I have a panel of fifteen readers, representing all grade levels, who have different genre preferences and who assist me when I am creating a book order. They inform me of their interests, and together we go through titles and series. Then I check reviews from such selection tools as Booklist, Choice Review Online, and School Library Journal to ensure that we are adding quality resources to the collection. Finally, I seek input from our teachers, because they often know of resources that would be of value to our collection since they are aware of students’ interests and needs as well. Through this process, we compile our books orders. Because we purchase fiction materials with the patrons in mind, there has been a steady increase in the number of books checked out during the past two years. Students from all grade and intellectual levels and from a wide range of interests are flooding into the media center daily to check out books.
When I first began working in the Windsor Forest High School Media Center six years ago, I saw an immediate need to weed numerous books from the collection. For a school with a little more than 1000 students, the library housed almost 30, 000 titles, many dating back to the 1970’s and before. In the course of four years, I was able to weed almost 20, 000 titles from the collection. I offered the books to teachers and students before sending the remaining ones to our local Humane Society, who picks them up from the school for free and sells them to raise money for the local animal shelter. For FRIT 7332, I created a collection evaluation and weeding plan for the career section in our media center. This section was a stand-alone section within the shelves of books that students rarely visited. I weeded the books that were considered to be aged and irrelevant, and then I disposed of the career section altogether, shelving the books back into the appropriate non-fiction categories. I am currently in the process of rebuilding the collection of books in the media center. This is a slow process due to budget restraints, but it is imperative that this media center never becomes just a warehouse for aging books.