Happy Halloween!!!!

While there were many great educational happenings in the library this week, this is the time we focus on the pure pleasure of Halloween! What I love about this day in the high school is that our oldest and youngest members of our community are the ones allowed to dress up! It is the seniors time to shine with their creative costumes,

while our preschoolers parade around the school excited to show off their own costumes!




















The library is always a hot spot for the seniors to show off their handiwork. We love having them come in and pose for us!

Elements and Compounds!!

This week chemistry classes have been in the library working on their element and compound project. Students have learned how to navigate the databases by beginning with Literati School. Literati provides a great overview on numerous topics. From there it links up to all of our other databases and will bring you right to search results from them. It is a great tool to begin the research process.

One of the many ways the library is used throughout the day. Teachers conferencing with students!

We are so happy to have our Access Students come to the library every day. Aside from checking out books and bringing joy to us all, they help us everyday with library tasks! After a long day we were all getting a little silly and the result was the following photo as the kids were moving the empty water bottles out of the library!!

It's the Great Pumpkins!!!!!

The library was a busy place this week! Between philosophy classes working on their ethical debate project, senior English classes research/writing their argument essays, seniors participating in a

college essay writing workshops AND hosting the results of the first annual Faculty Pumpkin Decorating Contest we were bustling with activity! The Access Program held a fundraiser to raise money for after school activities. Each department decorated a pumpkin and students voted at lunch, the creativity from each department in the school was fantastic and more importantly it was a great community building project for the faculty! While the library pumpkin did not win THIS year, we are happy to report that our Preschool department took top honors with their Minion Pumpkin!!!! We already have our idea for next year!

Some of the pumpkins and the winning Minion!!

The Library Pumpkin! 

Library is a Connection to the Community

This week the library was honored to receive donations from a former student. Bruce D'Agostino '65,  donated a collection of his personal military books to the library. A retired Air Force photographer, Mr. D'Agostino has worked with and met many prominent figures in military history. He has graciously shared some of his collection with the library in the hopes it will connect with the younger generation and educate them on the roles individual and the country has played in military history. He has also offered to speak to classes on his experiences. It was an honor to meet Mr. D'Agostino and spend time hearing his stories.

Mr. Cuoco's philosophy class is working on their ethics

project. In groups, they will form an opinion on an ethical debate and create a project to report back on to their peers. Working with Mr. Cuoco, we pulled a collection of books that work directly with this project as well as teach students how to navigate and search the Opposing Viewpoints Database. This database provides articles on a tremendous amount of topics and will give a pro and con side written by an expert in the field. Coupled with the books, students are able to gather strong research to back up their opinion on the topic of choice.

Look who's here!! One of our favorite former students stopped by the library for a visit!!! Kaiyah Goldsmith '14 home from college for the long weekend, she made a point of coming by and hanging out with us just like she used to for four years while at Natick High!!! We miss her!!

The first full week of school, Open House and classes beginning, it was a very busy week at the library! Freshmen orientation has begun during English classes. I love to watch how the freshmen come into the library that first meeting so young and wide-eyed and after working with them for the year the transformation is amazing! I look forward to the many projects I will be working on with the freshmen English team!

Coloring in the Library

Remember what it felt like to get a new coloring book as a child and a fresh pack of crayons? To open the pages and be able to create a bright new world on paper?

Coloring is a great way to relax the mind and body and yet we abandon it as we get older. Well studies have shown that coloring for teenagers and adults is very beneficial. We have reintroduced the love and art of coloring to the library.
Students and staff are encouraged to grab a coloring sheet, some crayons/colored pencils/markers and find a spot to color! The following article discusses the benefits of coloring!

Coloring isn't just for kids

 

 

 Get Your Trivia On

Ms. Williams has started a weekly trivia contest in the library! Each week she will have a question posted at the sign in desk in the library. Students and staff are encouraged to enter a guess and she will draw a name on Friday for a prize. We had lots of success for the first week! This weeks question was:

"What library was featured in the movie Transformers 2?" 

The answer is: Firestone Memorial Library at Princeton University

Classes Are Coming!!!

 The Classes are Coming!!!

Even with a half day and a day off, it has been a busy week in the library! Studies are filling up during every block and we are having many conversations with seniors about their post high school decisions! It always astounds me how much growth there is between freshmen year and senior year with our students! Most importantly, teachers are beginning to book classes! The schedule is filling up with Freshmen English classes, philosophy classes and child development classes will be hitting the library beginning next week!

METCO Meeting

I had the privilege of meeting with the METCO students this week to talk about the library and the resources and support available. We are very fortunate that our library is open until 7pm M-Th and Fri 7am-2:30pm, enabling students to have a place to study, collaborate and relax while waiting for rides, practices or activities. I emphasized how the library is the hub and community of the school and every student should see a piece of them within the collection, the environment and the resources. It is a great way to start the year by having meetings with various groups in the school to share what the library and the library staff has to offer!

New Teacher Presentation

Keeping in the theme of presenting to groups, I also had the honor of meeting with our new teachers on Thursday to discuss how they can best use the library. I love getting to know the new teachers and building strong relationships that translate into meaningful collaborative projects between the classroom teacher and the library teacher. It was a fun group and I look forward to working with many of them!

Book Review of the Week!

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier / Ismael Beah

Ms. Carrick has another great review! Check it out

“A long way gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” by Ismael Beah

I read this book years ago and was so impressed by Ismael Beah’s transformation into adulthood.  He grew up in a happy village surrounded by loving family and suddenly finds himself recruited by the rebel army being drugged and brainwashed and threatened. He finds himself doing awful acts that he has to do unless he wants to be killed by the rebel army general.  He can’t win either way and there was no way to escape alive.  He was drugged and forced to do unspeakable acts and finally was picked up by the UN and sent to the US for rehabilitation along with fellow soldiers.   The book talks about his healing and transformation back to humanity.  In 2004 he graduated from Oberlin College with a B.A. in political science.  He serves on many UN war councils educating world leaders on the issues of youth being recruited to fight.  This book is a page turner and an inspiration to the enduring human spirit.

You can donate to his causes on his website http://www.alongwaygone.com/ishmael_beah.html

Research is Underway!

Although this has been a short week, I am amazed at how many teachers have been using the library resources this early in the year. This week I have had numerous teachers reach out to me regarding our video databases! The databases we subscribe to are a huge asset to supporting the curriculum in any subject. Teaching students to locate and analyze information from a database provides them with a higher level of research skills.

The link for all of the library databases can be found here: http://www.natickps.org/departments/library/nhs/eresources.cfm If anyone needs a tutorial on how to use the databases or would like to work on how to incorporate the research databases into their lessons please do not hesitate to contact me.

Book Review!

Continuing with our staff book reviews, Ms. Carrick read Being Mortal / Atul Gawande and wrote the following passionate review!

 This summer I decided to read Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. I read his first two books, Complications and Better and loved the raw quality of his writing and admissions in making some mistakes as a doctor. They are all fascinating, dramatic reads, but having a father in law who turned 90 last year really made me want to read “Being Mortal”.  Dr. Gawande is a local ER Surgeon at the Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston (local!) and speaks frankly about his own experiences with his elderly father and the decisions they had to make (some good, some bad). He gives the reader an in depth history as to how all these assisted living facilities came to be and the history of nursing homes in America and how doctors might be overcommitting to extending life at all cost, that in some cases extend suffering. He argues that quality of life decisions must lie in the hands of the person suffering, and only addressing how to extend your life medically may not be the best option. The book speaks about the shortcomings of the medical field in dealing with end of life issues and how each person/family needs to do what is best for them and make their own decisions even if they run counter to what is popular/common or in the case of the elderly person -  what your children want you to do.

“In his compassionate and learned way, Gawande shows all of us - doctors included - how mortality must be faced, with both heart and mind”

~Sue Nelson

Seniors Show Their Spirit!

It's not all study and research in the library! Seniors are showing their spirit today with their Friday dress up day. Today's them is Hawaiian! We love to feel the spirit in the library!