by Lara Neel, Trade Marketing Manager
This installment of Librarians We Love started out with a very interesting question: How can children who are just learning to read choose a book they will want to read?
Craig Dunlap, who works at Yealey Elementary School in Kentucky’s Boone County School District, reached out to let us know about a collaborative project with his students that is trying to answer that question. He recently sent a link to the results and shared this summary!
How would someone pick a good fit book if they could not read?
Second graders at Yealey Elementary School in Florence, Kentucky, were posed this question by their teacher, Tina Zureick. After much discussion the students came to realize that they can tell their younger schoolmates about the books in our school library through video.
This is the third year that Mrs. Zureick has teamed up with technology teacher, Craig Dunlap, to teach her students how to write, film, and edit book commercials as a service project to beginning readers. This project literally takes months to complete, but students learn so much about persuasive writing, summarizing, typing and sharing in Google Docs, and basic video skills, not to mention leadership and peer cooperation. However, in chatting with authors and illustrators about their books an unexpected benefit started to surface. We can help authors and illustrators promote their books too.
That’s where Lerner came into the story.
We emailed Lerner to ask them to donate books to our school in exchange for creating videos to help promote their recently published books. Lerner was happy to jump on board and donated two sets of thirteen books for us to read and critique. Our students learned about dogs, gratitude, seasons, dealing with anger, and many other worthy subjects all while continuing to practice their new found skills in persuasive writing, peer editing, cloud-based productivity, and video production. You can see our Lerner videos at this link. We hope that you enjoy our videos and pick up one or more of these books for your personal collection.
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Thanks so much for sharing!
p.s. – Is there a librarian (or teacher) YOU love that we should know about? Fill out this form and we’ll follow up!