Celebrate National Poetry Month

With such a late Spring Break this year, I was really excited to offer our students some fun, hands-on ways to create and celebrate National Poetry Month in our library.

I posted these fliers around campus to encourage students to visit the library and celebrate with us this week!

I was inspired by my friend, Laura Foy, who is the librarian at a nearby middle school. She posted her poetry station and I knew this was something I could put together pretty quickly and my students would enjoy the opportunity to get creative. I definitely recommend following Laura’s library account on Instagram — she’s doing really cool things and constantly sharing!

We cut out a ton of words from magazines and pages from discarded books so students could create their own found poems and black out poetry. I also printed out some poems for students to take from the Poem in Your Pocket Day collection.

We are having a great time celebrating National Poetry Month with these activities in the library. Students have been creating poems during their free time in the library. One of our English teachers who is in the midst of her poetry unit with Sophomores is bringing her classes by to join in the fun. I’m looking forward to adding more to our celebration next year.

What are some fun things that you’ve done to incorporate National Poetry Month into your classroom or library?

Reminder: Awesome Library Resources Available!

Our students and teachers need to be reminded of our library resources, along with the fact that we are just HERE for them pretty regularly. Especially at this time of the school year, when things seem to start spiraling to the end of year chaos, it’s important to reach out with gentle reminders. I recently shared this fun graphic I created in Canva to remind students and faculty of some of the tools available to them in the library.

I wanted to create a simple graphic to showcase some of our newer and/or underused library resources without overwhelming them with too much info.

Many of my teachers and students are into podcasting, and it is frequently an option for our students when creating a product for an assignment. We have a super fancy podcasting set up in the library (that is honestly beyond my abilities and understanding), but I purchased these simple dual lavalier mics so students can plug into their own devices to record quickly and easily. For $10, purchasing these was a no-brainer, and they’ve already been used a ton.

I also recently purchased a collapsible green screen in hopes that I can get more students interested in recording and editing videos. We’ve had another (much more cumbersome) green screen tucked away somewhere on campus, but I’m hoping that this very portible option will get more use.

We’ve had our Silhouette Cameo for a while, but it’s still one of my favorite tools. I’ve used it to put up wall quotes in our library (see blog posts here, here, here, and here). I have several teachers who are interested in learning how to use this resource, and I can’t wait to teach them to use this awesome machine!

Sure, these resources are great and will get more use since the reminder. The best thing, though, was that I didn’t JUST get responses about these tools and resouces. Sending out the reminder to my students and faculty reminded them that I am here for them all the time. I also had more requests come in that week for help in using or locating other library resources. Talk about a major win! I think sending out these kind of “reminders” once a month, or at least once a quarter, is definitely on my to-do list for next school year.