school library Archives

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.

Book Clubs

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

January 23, 2026January 10, 2026| Aryssa Damron|Leave a comment

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.

Blogger School-Age Programs and Service Committee

Programming on the Fly

January 27, 2024April 1, 2025| School-Age Programs and Services Committee|1 Comment

This year, I have been trying to boost library programming opportunities. Planning a program can feel daunting, but it doesn’t have to be such a challenge. If the goal is to get readers into the library and engaged with library resources, a program can be short, simple, and still fun! In addition, planning time can be quick and dirty but still deliver a result that gets readers into the library. I’ve chosen to focus on lunch & learn opportunities. I work in a middle school and want to catch kids while they are at school, and not outside school hours. The best time to do this is during lunch, which is 30 minutes for each grade level. Quick engagement sessions can be modified to work for a public library outside of school hours or for a school library at a different level with a different schedule as well. For each…

Blogger Building Partnerships committee

Enhancing the Mind-Body Connection in Your Storytime

January 20, 2019January 18, 2019| ALSC Building Partnerships|Leave a comment

Long stretches of sitting can leave grown-ups stiff and little ones antsy. Since exercise is known to boost children’s cognitive performance as well as stimulate their brain growth (Dewar 2015), why not incorporate some gentle movement into your next story break? Tai chi, yoga, and your own creative take on physical expression can build the mind-body connection, and successful partnerships between multi-hyphenate authors, elementary educators, a public library, and a local nonprofit offer a roadmap for recreating a movement-filled storytime in your own space. If this is your first time incorporating movement into your classroom or library read-aloud, try starting with a book that will offer you and the children some basic guidance. When an opportunity arose to bring author Sylvia Liu to a classroom for a tai chi-based book presentation in the spring of 2017, children’s literacy nonprofit An Open Book Foundation (AOB), which brings authors, illustrators, and their…

ALSC Online Courses

It’s Mutual: School & Public Library Collaboration

June 21, 2015June 17, 2015| Guest Contributor|Leave a comment

Starting this summer, I will be teaching an online course for ALSC called It’s Mutual: School and Public Library Collaboration. As two public institutions, it’s important for us to reach out to each other, especially as budgets tighten. We already share an audience that we hope will turn into lifelong learners (and library users). With early literacy programming, public libraries are often the first place kids start learning, when they become students we supplement their learning, and hopefully, when students graduate, they will still rely on the library to aid their learning. When schools and public libraries come together they can share expertise, workers, and save money by sharing resources. Let’s say you have a database that doesn’t see a lot of use. If every student has a library card they can all get to the database. If public librarians and school teaching staff get together to teach the students…

Tag: school library

3 Ways to Bring Community Service into the Library

February 16, 2026January 23, 2026| Aryssa Damron|Leave a comment