I Love Libraries and am excited about their future!

Let’s bring resources to students & help literacy evolve by transforming the library! What could be a better mission? That’s why I am so excited that my 8th annual writing contest theme this year will celebrate libraries! It was easy to select this theme for students to write about because everywhere I looked I was seeing something exciting happening in the library!

First I saw that contest sponsor Mackin Educational Resources, proudly announced the formation of the TYSL movement, or Transform Your School Library. This philanthropic endeavor was designed to provide school librarians and educators with critical information related to the evolution of today’s school library.

        TYSL is comprised of dozens of the country’s leading change-advocates committed to shaping the future direction of school libraries. One of my judges for the contest this year, Shannon McClintock Miller, also happens to be one of these advocates, so the word LIBRARY was just speaking to me! She wrote a great post about the movement that you’ll want to read.

This is a valuable video explaining the whole program and what we can do together to transform the school library  Mackin has unveiled the new TYSL website and we will be using the hashtag #Mackin-TYSL for the ongoing conversation around this movement on Twitter. And you can get your own badge that you've joined the movement too!

Next sponsor Tales2GO, was sharing case studies on their website  about how their award winning audio service was being integrated into school libraries. Their tool is helping to develop vocabulary, fluency and comprehension skills for students and transforming the library experience. More library goodness!

Then I saw that author Chris Grabenstein had a new book “Mr. Lemoncello’s Library Olympics”.  I had loved the character Mr. Lemoncello, librarian extraordinaire, in his first book “Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library”. When I read that Mr. Lemoncello has invited teams from across the United States to compete in the first-ever Library Olympics and that the games in this Olympics feature a duodecimalthon of 12 library-related games, and all were taking place in the most advanced and modern of libraries, the Lemoncello Library, I had to ask him to be a judge for my writing contest. Whew, and guess what? He said yes!!

   I thought how wonderful it would to share important information about transforming libraries with all the teachers and librarians I know. Also how to get the kids involved in writing about the library. I smile just thinking about reading contest entries about adventures in the library.