Author: Aryssa Damron

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Bringing Sign Language into Story Time with Corey Tabor’s Fox Books

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Fox Pop

A few years ago, I took a class through ALSC specifically about using American Sign Language in storytime and library programming. I immediately brought my beginner ASL skills into the school library, and used my learning as a chance to learn alongside my students. I learned signs as I needed to for storytimes, search sign dictionaries after student inquiries, and sought out sign language brain breaks. One of the authors I found that lent themselves to ASL inclusion perfectly for elementary school readers was Corey Tabor.  The Fox Series Corey R. Tabor is the author of many beloved children’s books that are perfect read storytimes, read-alouds and quiet reading with families, but his Fox easy reader series is a particular delight for storytimes with kids from around 2 or 3 in age to 1st or 2nd grade. There are eight books in the easy reader series–all leveled as “My First”…

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Blogger Aryssa Damron

3 Dream Jobs I Wish Existed for Kid Lit Lovers

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As a child, maybe you dreamed of being a princess or an astronaut who specifically does the flips off the ladder, or maybe you dreamed of fantastical jobs only to find out that those jobs don’t quite exist on job boards. Why should that change as an adult? Other than the fact that I now know that one can become a “consultant” for just about anything, I find myself in these moments of fantasy imagining opening up LinkedIn or Indeed and seeing the perfect job to blend my love of children’s literature with some other facet of my life: theatre, museums, story time, et cetera. Here are three jobs I wish really, truly existed for us kid lit lovers out there:  Story Time Educator for Professional Sports Teams In this dream job, I would travel around to professional sports team—basketball, football, hockey, baseball, etc—and teach them how to properly do…

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Ending the School Library Year Strong (And Creatively)

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Reading is Magical in the School Library

As the school year comes to an end, my library becomes a bustling hub of books in motion, final pushes on curricular units, and preparation for closing out the year. And yet, we’re still teaching 23 classes each week on top of it all–so here’s what I’m doing over the next month to end the school library year strong, and creatively.  Making the Scholastic Book Fair Fun and Equitable The first big “push” of my last month of school is our Scholastic Book Fair, which is hosted and run by our school library. It’s a fun time, but it’s stressful, and I’m always a bit more relaxed when it is over! In order to make it more fun and equitable this year, students who are waiting to shop during their class time will do some fun book-ish activities. In order to make sure everyone leaves with something, I utilize Share…

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Blogger Aryssa Damron

Expanding Novel Studies into Research Opportunities

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This Spring, my 4th and 5th graders are spending the bulk of their library classes doing a novel study of a book that I loved and devoured in 2024–A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hdoing aall by Jasmine Warga. This quick-paced chapter book, which clocks in at just over 200 pages, is full of relatable coming-of-age characters, family dynamics, and of course…the theft of a piece of art.  Let me tell you about how this book revitalized my library teaching this semester.

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3 Ways to Bring Community Service into the Library

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Constitution Week Bulletin Board

As a school librarian involved in a lot of community service groups outside of school, I love to use my 400+ students, their endless creativity, and their passion for a good coloring project to brighten up our community just a little bit. In the two years since I moved from a public library to a school library, I’ve experimented with using different projects , many of them which could be easy passive programming, to help my students engage in community service and volunteerism projects in the school library.

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Book Clubs

5 Things I’m Doing Differently In My Elementary School Library

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As December roared to a close, I looked at my curriculum tracking document with all my check boxes and wanted to exhale, but I was already thinking about the next six months ahead. By the end of the fall semester, I had gotten into a good rhythm with my teaching in the school library, and I was happy with what we had accomplished. I knew I needed to make a few changes though—not just to make my life as a school librarian easier, but to better serve myself and my students in the months ahead. 

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