Fellowship, food, and fantastic sharing! Participants in the “Potluck for Learning” held at Kaimuki High School Library on Saturday, December 1, gave the event a unanimous thumbs up. The potluck brought together 34 attendees from private and public schools, public and academic libraries, who had a grand time exchanging ideas for lessons and promotions. This was a landmark occasion for HASL in bringing together professionals from different libraries. They had the opportunity to do informal, small group exchanges in two 30-minute swaps. Junie Hayashi from Leeward Community College and Darren Tanaka from Kailua Elementary graciously agreed to do formal 15-minute presentations: Junie shared how ENG 100 students were jazzed to conduct research following the “Epic Rap Battles of History” and Darren provided an inspiring chronicle of his work with elementary students in revamping his approach to learning by giving them voice and choice. In their evaluations, attendees enthusiastically recommended having more sessions like this one where ideas might be shared in an informal setting with librarians from diverse communities coming together. They loved how the session was organized and were delighted to receive a “recipe booklet” that included brief descriptions of each person’s potluck contribution with names and email contact information. This information is also available at https://goo.gl/Lvy2yx Thanks are due to the session planners Sandy Yamamoto, Joyce Tokuda, Lori Chun, and Vi Harada. They also had invaluable assistance from Imelda Amano, Elodie Arellano, Meera Garud, Caroline Lee, MB Ogawa, and Audrey Okemura. Jan Lee, Teresa Sakurada and Buddy Bess deserve kudos for contributing door prizes and giveaways. The following photos capture some of the potluck activities. Small Group Sharing let everyone hear about the great lessons, projects and activities happening in our libraries. Junie Hayashi from Leeward Community College showed us how she engages students into research with her Rapping for Research Project. Darren Tanaka from Kailua Elementary let us know it is okay to get out of our comfort zones, be challenged and get “messy” to help our kids achieve.
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Retirees Publish Book on Hawaii’s InterneesClaire Sato, a retired school librarian, and Violet Harada, LIS professor emeritus, have edited A Resilient Spirit: The Voice of Hawaii’s Internees. The book includes excerpts from various men and women, who were incarcerated at internment camps and detention centers in Hawaii. Claire and Violet spent three years combing through archival records at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii’s Tokioka Heritage Resource Center to select moving and poignant vignettes from the internees’ oral histories, letters, writings, and poetry. Claire says her motivation for taking on this project was, “I wanted to have these stories told so that others would know that once there was a group of people who were unjustly treated, and they rose above it with dignity, strength and resilience.” Violet added, “It gave us the chance to send the message that history will continue to repeat itself unless we tell the real stories and stand up to the racism and bigotry wherever it exists. The book was published by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii (JCCH) and is available at the JCCH Gift Shop. Order forms are available at https://www.jcch.com/gift-shop A Library Resurrected at Keolu ElementaryThe re-opening of a school library can be a little more exciting than a grand opening. Why? Time honored values and beliefs come alive once again, and a former community of supporters reappear to work side by side with new advocates. And so it was at Keolu Elementary library in the month of October. New librarian-teacher, Gabriele Finn, was given the task of restoring the library to serve a literacy-hungry student body of 150. Gabriele worked furiously with suggestions from Mokapu Elementary librarian, Caitlin Ramirez, to layout a new floor map and to re-purchase LS2 for circulation and management. Extra help came from HASL Buddies Jarri Kagawa, Sandi Takishita, Cheryl Fukuda, Terri Korpi & Imelda Amano, all retirees. In a whopping 15 hours and several days of additional help from EAs, the entire facility was all in place. Keolu Elementary Library is ready to welcome its patrons once more! By Finn & Amano Potluck for Learning (December 1) Sponsored by the Hawai‘i Association of School Librarians Join our potluck for learning! This is a great opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues in all types of libraries. We plan this as an informal morning of sampling the great things everyone is doing to promote information literacy and other types literacies in our different libraries!
The only rule for any local potluck is that you bring something. For this special potluck, we ask everyone to bring a favorite lesson, a project idea, a reading promotion, or something else that has made learning (and teaching) fun and effective in your library. The more friends joining this potluck, the more to share and the more to take home! Who is invited: all librarians in school and academic as well as public and special libraries When: Saturday, December 1, 2018, 8:30 am to noon Where: Kaimuki High School Library, 2705 Kaimuki Avenue, Honolulu, HI 9681. Mahalo to Lori Chun, host librarian [click here for campus map] Cost: $5 collected at the door Refreshments: this is a voluntary potluck; bring a snack to share! Please register by November 15 [click for online registration form]. We will confirm your registration and send you additional information. Questions? Please feel free to contact any one of the session coordinators:
We look forward to hearing from you! Our First Administrator Member Kudos to our first school principal joining HASL! We’ve honored many administrators for our Outstanding Service Award but this is the first time they've been invited to officially join our roster. A warm welcome to Mrs. Anne Marie Murphy. She came to the islands in 1993 and began her educational career as a science teacher at Wheeler Intermediate in 1996. After completing her administrative training, she started her meteoric rise to become principal at Central Middle School. Her passion to serve students and to bring excellence in our schools are clearly reflected in this interview. LINK Caitlin RamirezLibrarian at Mokapu Elementary School, Kailua, Oahu At our school library, I want students to stretch their creativity, build their collaboration skills, and develop their background knowledge. I want them to have the freedom, and the responsibility, to choose how they spend their time and operate as an independent learner. Library centers is a great way to make this vision come to life. I have several centers. Some are simple and fully implemented. Some are complex and still under construction. At the library discussion board, students can respond to a question and check out how others have responded to the question. I change questions monthly and I ask questions that are relevant to the month or to things happening at school. For instance, this month is book fair and the theme is Enchanted Forest, so our question is: if you could have any enchanted forest creature as a pet, what would you want and why? The collaborative coloring table illustrates the idea that working together has beautiful results. Students enjoy the meditative process of coloring and it helps develop the fine motor skills that they need to become surgeons, drone pilots, or maybe just write legibly. Don’t know what to do with all those books you just discarded from the library? I weeded my collection and created a free book shelf for students and teachers. Students can take a book from the shelf and...here’s the best part...keep it FOREVER! They get so excited about this. Teachers can get great books for their classroom libraries too. I encourage students to donate books they no longer want in their personal collection so someone else can enjoy them. I always remind them to check with their parent first. At the Word Play Center, students can complete crossword puzzles, word scrambles, word searches, and play Madlibs. As the year progress, I’m planning to introduce poetry activities like blackout poems and magnetic poems. Students hone their observation and spatial recognition skills by working on a jigsaw puzzle. They have to be patient and persistent too - since it can take as long as a quarter to finish! I’m working on expanding our STEAM center. Right now we only have an origami kit, a simple engineering kit, and a bookmark making kit. But I’m planning to include a yarn arts kit (for lei making and weaving), microscopes with slides, and a lego area. More than 50% of our 3rd-6th graders said they want to make cool stuff in the library, so I anticipate this center being popular once we get it off the ground!
An entire month of school has gone by and it is time for another blog! Need an idea for a small, easy-to-do change? Well, is your MakerSpace addressing ALL learners from the visually impaired to ELL? Here are a few easy tips from Gina Seymour’s ALA breakout titled, “The Inclusive Makerspace: #WeNeedDiverseMakerSpaces”:
Connect with your ELL or SPED department and schedule a set time for their students to come and enjoy Makerspace! Begin a partnership! Help HASL by writing a blog post this year. We know you are doing amazing things in your libraries, and we want to share your knowledge and advice. This blog post is to help you get started. We have two templates for you to consider. Once you know what you want to post, email us your content at [email protected], and we will post it for you (individual accounts may be coming soon). Format 1: SlideshowExample What you need to provide
Format 2: Text with optional pictures Example What you need to provide
Paragraphs explaining the following:
References, Longer advice, Example posts: The Foolproof Formula for Writing a Solid Blog Post [Template] via Corey Wainwright at HubSpot, 2017 Blogs for Programming Librarians via Courtney Wolfe at The Programming Librarian, 2018 How to Write a Blog Post: The Simple 5 Step Template via Joe Bunting at The Write Practice We are grateful for the opportunity to serve in HASL, along with Dr. Harada as our guiding force. We follow in the footsteps of MB Ogawa and Sandy Yamamoto, who thoughtfully guided us during our transition this summer. Our biennium began with a flurry of activities starting with a trip to New Orleans for the American Library Association (ALA) convention. We arrived on a Thursday to get ourselves acclimated to the weather and the city’s great vibe. New Orleans has so much to offer in terms of food, music, Cajun-Creole culture, history and architecture; there was a definite charm.
A big highlight at ALA was listening to keynote speaker and former First Lady, Michelle Obama, as she was interviewed by Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. Obama spoke much about her upcoming book, “Becoming” and stressed that we all have a story to tell because there is a “voice” in all of us. It is these “voices” that continue to fill the pages of print material and digital content in the halls of our libraries, media centers, “student success centers” and “literacy learning centers”. After Obama’s inspiring appearance, we attended 4-6 conference sessions daily between Saturday and Monday, along with two American Association of School Librarians (AASL) affiliate meetings. Here’s a LINK of our experiences during those 5 hot days in The Crescent City. What were some of our takeaways? Imelda: I learned about “convention culture”, as it was my first national convention. I had the luxury of “soaking it all up” as a retiree as well. It was relatively comforting to know that Hawaii shares similar issues with the rest of the nation in school librarianship. And, that we are also progressing in “right directions” too, such as, library standards implementation, advocacy, inclusion and integration of civic education. Meera: I noticed one message reappear throughout the weekend: we all have voices and stories to tell. As librarians we have the joy and responsibility of finding books with authentic and diverse voices as well as helping our students develop new media in their own voices. A question I hope to work through is: How do we publish more books and media that reflect Hawaii? Fortunately, I walked away with specific tips to ensure makerspaces and media centers are inclusive and how to discuss race with children. These are essential steps to helping our students find their voices and tell their stories. Lastly, conventions are about colleagueship and friendships. We met AASL affiliates from other states and did a little bit of networking and we also got to know each other better. On this note, we hope to get to know HASL members better, other librarians outside of our organization better, as well as various stakeholders. Together, our voices can help school libraries transform and stay strong. |