Jennifer Boykin's School Library Blog

Sarah Kay is an amazing poet. I’ve viewed several of her poems on YouTube but have never seen this TedTalk in our modules for this week. She spoke about not rushing stories and the 30/30 challenge, which is writing one poem for each day in the month of April for National Poetry month. She discovered that she was writing about the same thing each day. She uses a quote from French essayist and poet Paul Valéry: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned” (Kay, 2011, 6:01). This reminds me of the importance of revision and how it's so important to not only poetry, but to storytelling in general as well. Kay uses her hands, facial expressions, and gestures as she tells the story at the end. If you want more Sarah Kay, look for more of her videos on YouTube. “When Love Arrives” with Phil Kay (no relation!) is one of my favorites. (See the video of it below!) I appreciated seeing Sarah Kay in this week’s modules as a reminder of the storytelling power of poetry. It reminds me of the slam ...

  The Venn Librarian's Logo I did a basic Google search for school librarian blogs and found a website of 101 Blogs AboutSchools, Books, and Libraries on the TeachThought: We Grow Teachers website. This website was very helpful because it organized the blogs by categories like School Librarians, Teacher Librarians, etc. After clicking on a few that were not quite up to date, I settled on Venn Librarian , a blog by Laura Pearle, who is the director of libraries for Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts. She is the Venn Librarian because she blogs about the intersection of schools, libraries, and technology; her Venn Diagram logo is above. Initial Thoughts on Appearance and Navigation I like the clean layout of this blog. The tabs are clearly labeled and include Curriculum Vitae, Presentations, Professional Activities, and Publications. The content in each of these tabs gives the blog credibility; it shows Pearle’s experience, education, and publication history outside of ...

  Student feedback on the StoryLink project. This week’s reading included Chapter 10 in S torytelling: Art & Technique , “Children and Young Adults as Storytellers” (Greene & Del Negro, 2010). It reminded me of a project I did with my students nearly five years ago. I want to reflect this week on that project and how it helped students unlock the power of storytelling. I love writing poetry and stories, and to share that love with my students whenever and wherever I can is a blessing. My goal is to continue to that work when I become a librarian. The Project I primarily teach high school students. For the 2017-18 school year, I taught a class called Reading Seminar, which is for first time freshman with low reading scores. The goal of the class to provide interventions and reading strategies to improve student reading and writing skills so they can be successful in their English 1 classes, which they had with teachers other than me. My goal was to use...

  My goal for this storytelling experience is to tell a story that high school students would be interested in hearing. The mantra I kept telling myself comes from Greene & Del Negro (2010) “The storyteller must take the story from the printed page and blow the breath of life into it” (p. 59). I constantly reminded myself of how I can make this story come alive, how I can make it the characters more human and help the listener to connect to the story.   Selection Folktales are a good genre to share with young adults.   It was perfect for this week since we were reading folktales and I read a handful of West African folktales . After reading several, I settled on “The Drunkard’s Wisdom.” Although this story’s main character is a drunkard, the story does not focus on his drinking and has a moral that students will likely be able to relate to. Some students may know of a drunkard figure through their familial connections, or they may be more familiar with the chara...