Summer reading lists!

Here are some great sites to get you started with summer reading!

***Remember that we have eBooks available through our catalog, as well as the free summer trial of the EBSCO K-8 eBook collection. Directions for accessing both are on the Activity Stream on MyOWS.***

KCLS Summer Learning site

A Diverse #SummerReading List For Kids

K-8 Summer Reading Lists from The Association for Library Service to Children (from last year, but still great!)

New York Public Library’s Summer Reading Lists for all ages

As always, Goodreads - a social networking site for readers - is a fantastic place to get reading suggestions. My own Goodreads page has over 1000 books sorted by genre, themes, recommended age, etc.

Looking forward to seeing you in September! Have a fun and safe summer filled with great books!

5th graders help make the web less biased!

During 5th grade information literacy classes, students learned about The Geographically Uneven Coverage of Wikipedia. As the Oxford University researchers wrote, after examining "44 language versions" of Wikipedia, they found that, "slightly more than half of the global total of 3,336,473 articles are about places, events and people... occupying only about 2.5% of the world’s land area."

They also read and discussed, Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List, which described how "Wikipedia’s contributor base... was barely 13 percent women" and how "the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis" with traditionally female topics getting far less attention.

I challenged students to explain why we should care and got some great answers. In their own words, a biased resource:

• lets people down when they need information because it's incomplete
• isn't good for the social environment (building respect between people from different groups)
• is unfair - we should have respect for the importance of all topics regardless of gender and geography
• is wrong because people's interests aren't limited by gender

The next step was that they had to come up with a topic that would help correct one or both biases - geographic and gender - for which there was no article or only a stub (something too short) in Simple English Wikipedia. This is the version of Wikipedia for younger readers and English language learners.

Next they researched their topic using high quality sources, wrote articles, and created proper citations. For our final class they got to read and comment on one another's work.

I hope you'll take the time to click on a few of the links below and appreciate all their hard work! They chose a great range of interesting subjects and have the satisfaction of knowing that they've helped to make Wikipedia a bit less biased.

Original articles by our 5th graders:
Charlie - Albert Pujols
Elina – Marjane Satrapi
Finn - Aztec mythology
Ishan – Wilma Rudolph
Katherine - Gracie Gold
Logan - Ruby Bridges
Lucy - Mikaela Shiffrin
Nate - Malagasy language
Quincy - Kazu Kibuishi
Sage – Alfredo Stroessner
Sofia – Sharon Creech
Stella - Misty May-Treanor
Thomas - Jean Fritz
Tyler – Iditarod

Articles our students added to:
Adam – Diego Maradona
Bram – David Ben-Gurion
Olivia - Eartha Kitt
Samantha - Barbara Ann Scott
Sena – Lionel Messi 
Sydney - Shel Silverstein

Get your poem into a bus!

Feel inspired to write a poem? If so, you can enter it in the Poetry on Buses competition sponsored by King County Metro and 4Culture. Some of our students' artwork will appear on local bus shelters - let's see if we can get some of our writing inside the buses as well!

Poems must be 50 words or less on the topic of "home." There is a special category for poets under 18. The deadline is June 30th!

Middle schoolers' six-word memoirs

Every month I run a fun online contest for middle school students. It's a way to keep older students - so busy with homework and extracurriculars - connected to the Library Learning Commons. During April and May, the challenge was to write a six-word memoir. Below are a few of the particularly striking ones that I submitted to SMITH magazine's six-word memoir site for schools. Don't we have some talented students?