This companion volume to "Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Reading Comprehension," which covered lower grades, completes the educational arc by focusing on adolescent readers in grades 6-12. Drawing on the most current standards from the American Association for School Librarians (AASL) as well as cutting-edge research, this straightforward…

Imagine a classroom where students are actively engaged in seeking scientific knowledge from books and computers. Think of a classroom in which students fervently write to create PowerPoint presentations about their scientific topic and then enthusiastically practice their speaking roles to serve as docents in a classroom museum setting. Visualize…

"Nintendo Power," "Sports Illustrated for Kids," and a biography of President Obama were on prominent display as the author entered the branch library in Forest Hills, Queens. The librarian looked skeptical when the author asked the librarian if she could leave copies of "IndyKids" newspapers on the free literature table. The branch manager…

In the rapidly changing globalized world, school librarians cannot prepare today's students for every possible outcome, but they can give them the skills that will make them adaptable in 21st-century learning and work settings. The mission for school library programs is to ensure that students are effective users of ideas and information by being…

It's winter! While it is frosty outside, one can at least think warm thoughts by starting now to plan ahead for summer information literacy programs. This article is designed to provide some ideas for planning next summer's reading, sleuthing, and research programs. It features a variety of programs organized by academic librarians this past…

In this article, the authors describe McNair Middle School's Independent Study process. Each year in late January the authors connect to look at the calendar to schedule time for the seventh-grade gifted and talented (GT) students to come to the school library to begin their annual Independent Study. "Independent study is a planned research…

One of the benefits of working at the middle school level is the opportunity to work with colleagues in a variety of content areas; this not only makes work more interesting, but offers a multidisciplinary approach to learning that ultimately benefits the students. In the Londonderry (New Hampshire) School District, collaboration between classroom…

Brandon School is a small pre-K through 8th grade school serving approximately 327 students. It does not have the funding that a lot of larger school districts have. When the special needs teacher approached the author a few years ago about high-interest, low-level books and asked for ideas to help her students read more, they came up with the…

Today's graduates will live and work with people from unknown places and backgrounds. Through the world of story students can journey through unfamiliar cultures, gaining knowledge and understanding of challenges faced by their contemporaries around the world. By selecting fiction books with a global focus, school librarians broaden student choice…

Teens are impatient and unsophisticated online researchers who are often limited by their poor reading skills. Because they are attracted to clean and simple Web interfaces, they often turn to Google--and now Wikipedia--to help meet their research needs. The Google Game, co-authored by this author, teaches kids that there is a well-thought-out…

E-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes and Noble Nook are beginning to make their way into school libraries and classrooms. It's about time. E-readers have tremendous potential to entice reluctant readers to read more. A study that the authors recently conducted among low-reading-ability middle school students demonstrated that potential.…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a whole picture book worth? This was exactly the question Pierce School teachers asked themselves when they began the project of compiling a photo library for creating realistic and relevant short texts by and for students across all grades in their K-8 elementary school. In an effort to…

Teachers often find themselves lamenting the loss of emergent readers to video games, television, and, most recently, the TTYL (talk/type to you later) culture of text messaging and Internet social networking. Trying to impart the joy of a good read to middle school students feels like pushing religion onto the perfectly content worshipers of…

Developmentalists state that children are born with the intrinsic motivation to learn, but studies show that this intrinsic desire to learn begins to wane during the early school years, around third grade, and continues a steady decline through eighth grade. Intrinsic motivation is at the core of information literacy, the foundation for a desire…

In school library research programs, a challenge for students doing research emerges when they take their projects home and turn to their parents for assistance. Often parents lack sufficient knowledge of the research process to be able to effectively help their children. Moreover, teachers expect parents to monitor student homework but rarely…