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First Blog Post of the Year!

Hi everybody! It's my first monthly blog post of the year - I can tell that you're super excited. As with previous years, this blog will discuss various library media center-ish items that I feel are useful for our staff to know. As this is the first one, I'll be blogging about more than one thing, so bear with me!


Banned Books Week
This past week we celebrated Banned Books Week. This is a celebration that takes place all across the country and draws attention to the intellectual freedom we enjoy in our country and the harms of censorship. Why is it a celebration? Because even though thousands of books are challenged (meaning people want them to be removed from library shelves) every year, books are rarely banned (actually removed from the shelves). Essentially, it's a celebration of our freedom to read what we want and to seek out information from various points of view. Hooray!

For a list of the top 10 banned books this year, please click here.


Flocabulary
Now, on to Flocabulary. I want to take this opportunity to remind everyone of this fun new resource that is available to us this year. This resource presents information in rap videos for various topics. Just think about how popular Hamilton is right now - I've heard students reciting every word from some of the songs! Bearing that in mind, I'd like you to know that Flocabulary is more than just a place to watch videos. It also has awesome background tracks that you can use for students to create their own educational raps, and lesson plans as well. If you have any questions about Flocabulary or want to collaborate on how to incorporate it into your lessons,                                                                please feel free to come pay me a visit!

Also, it's very important that when you join Flocabulary for the first time that you go through THIS LINK:

http://flocabulary.com/signup/join/school/scranton-middle-school-4

Otherwise, Flocabulary doesn't realize that you have an account associated with our school and you will only get small snippets of videos!


YA Book Club
And, finally - let's kick off our YA book club! Our first book will be My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows. This book defies belonging to any particular genre and is a little cheeky. The cover looks very girly, but two of the main characters are male. If you are an audiobook person, I have it on good authority that the audio version of this is all kinds of awesome! We will plan on meeting the last Thursday of each month. So, our first meeting will be Thursday, October 26th. Snacks will be provided, along with great company - come join us!

Our November book will be Warcross by Marie Lu. She's a popular author around here with our students, and this is her newest book that just came out a week or so ago. Our first meeting will be with just staff, but starting in November, I will be inviting students to join us!


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