Inspiring stuff by Joyce Valenza
I cannot imagine how she manages to fit it all into a working week, but Joyce Valenza is an inspirational ‘Shifted Librarian’… watch and learn.
where all my ideas and excitement about school libraries bubbles over
I cannot imagine how she manages to fit it all into a working week, but Joyce Valenza is an inspirational ‘Shifted Librarian’… watch and learn.
We have now been in Hong Kong for 18 days, and Friday marked the end of my first week of teaching at AISHK. I have now met almost all of the classes from Prep to Year 6 (there were a few interruptions for various things), and truly and honestly it was lovely! The majority of the children are happy, friendly, reasonably polite, quite a few are precocious in their conversation, and seemed quite interested in ‘The New Library Teacher’! I have to give a huge vote of thanks to the outgoing Teacher Librarian (I haven’t asked her permission to name her, but believe me she deserves the recognition!). She has left behind a school of children who have been immersed in advanced research skills, exposed to referencing and inquiry skills at every year level, who see Library lessons as something to look forward to, and has left me with a very high standard to meet!
Walking around the school on the preceding Thursday and Friday I detected a certain level of anticipation and foreknowledge in the cries of “Hello Mrs Reid!” and “Hello New Library Teacher” from students of various heights. This led me to implement a Plan for my first lesson with every class – I did not introduce myself.
The students obviously all knew who I was, and the class teacher (they stay with their class for Library) would often tell the students to greet me, so self-introductions seemed a bit superfluous. Instead, I asked the classes to tell me what they already knew about me – this was usually an entertaining 5 minutes 🙂 Generally we covered:
with occasional diversions into my previous life as a Japanese & French teacher, or my award last year (kind of embarrassing hearing about that multiple times during the week!).
Next I told the children that as I was so new to Hong Kong there are lots of things I need to know, which they could teach me. I asked the children to Think-Pair-Share to come up with things they thought were important, and gave them about 20-30 seconds. I’m really pleased with this activity – the children got to share with me their local knowledge, it was a very inclusive way to start our teacher/class relationships, and I learned a great deal in a very short time! Also it didn’t get boring because as the week went on I warned each class that I had had X number of classes giving me information before their turn, so they had to be creative! Things I learned:
As I said above, I’m really glad I took this approach – it let me start by showing respect for the experience and knowledge that children bring with them to my classroom, and it gave me a fabulous list of things to do and see around Hong Kong!
This coming week will see me diving into a lot of reading promotion activities, while I get a handle on the students, on how the Library program can complement classroom work, and how things work generally at this new school. I’m having fun designing a Reading Passport for Year 3 – looking at a Blooms X Multiple Intelligences framework to inspire different and creative ways to respond to books in a format that will fit within a folded A4 page.