(Photo courtesy of Sham Jolimie under Creative Commons)

Every Thursday the teaching team will meet with the 8th grade to check in with them, help them stay on task, and make suggestions. This week we wanted to make sure the students were set with everything they needed before the holidays, so that they could not only do some work during the break, but also be ready to hit the ground running when we return to school on January 4. Our technology teacher CJ set them up with official school Gmail accounts (which up until now have been reserved for our high school students) so that they would have a professional account to contact organizations and receive information. CJ turned off most of the social networking aspects of Gmail, as these accounts are just to be used for this project. We explained the importance of acting like a professional in both their written correspondence and spoken interviews. So to that end, we provided them with these email and phone guidelines (authored by our etiquette-savvy Core teachers, SMR and RB):

SJ PROJECT 2010-2011
EMAIL TEMPLATE
Heading: LREI Students Seek To Assist YOU

Mr./Ms. Contact Person, Job Title
Audubon Society
14 Tenth Avenue
New York, NY 10023

Dear Ms. Contact Person:
Or Dear Sir or Madam:
Or Dear Audubon Society:

We are eighth graders at LREI: The Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School. Our class is embarking on a Social Justice Project and is seeking to assist organizations in NYC, like yours, which work on behalf of various civil and human rights issues.

Our group is very interested in your organization and would like to assist you in any way (i.e. as volunteers) to gain hands-on experience in the field.

There are four students in our group and our goal is to volunteer 5 times over the next 4 months. Concurrently, we will be writing about, researching and creating a website on the topic of social justice for our school and wider community.

If your organization is interested, please contact us as soon as possible so that we can follow up with more specific information about our project. If there is someone else that we should contact, please let us know.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Group Names
LREI: Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School
272 Sixth Avenue
New York, NY 10014
Contact email

SJ PROJECT 2010-2011
PHONE SCRIPT

(We had quite a bit of fun reading these aloud and role-playing them in class:)

“Hello. May I speak with [Contact Person] or [a volunteer coordinator]?
Thank you.”
(If the answer if no): “May I leave a message?”

Script: (something like this can be left on voicemail or message, too)

Hi! My name is ___________________ and I’m an eighth grader at LREI: Little Red School House, in Greenwich Village. I am embarking on a Social Justice Project at my school and am looking to find volunteer opportunities with NYC civil and human rights related organizations.

My group heard about your organization, and is very interested in the possibility of volunteering for you, and learning about what you do. We have a team of 4 students and are looking to volunteer approximately 5 times over the next few months.

Possible ways the conversation could go:

a) Can I talk to your teacher?: Yes, my teacher’s name is __________ and they can explain more about our project’s assignments.

b) What are you actually doing? Can you tell me more about this?: Sure! The curriculum in our class this year focuses on civil and humans rights. As a way for us to gain some real-world experience learning about these issues, our grade has chosen Social Justice-related topics and are learning about them through research, interviews and volunteer experiences with various NYC organizations whose work relates to our study.

We learned about your organization’s work on behalf of ________________________ and are excited about what you do. We’d like to learn more by visiting and helping out. We have a group of 4 students who would like to come at least 5 times over the next few months.

We are also building websites about what we learn and will present our final project to the entire school.

c) I am not the person that you should speak to, can I give you the contact of the correct person? Yes, thank you. We will follow up with them by phone call and email. (Make sure that you write everything down!)

d) What type of work/volunteer experience do you want to have? We are interested in learning about anything that relates to your organization, the issues and communities that you work with, and how you do what you do. We are mostly available afterschool and on the weekends as apprentices, interns or helpers.

In years past, students have done everything from tutoring, helping with conferences and attending meetings.

e) We actually cannot accommodate any volunteers OR we cannot have any volunteers under 18: “Okay, thank you very much for your time. Do you know of any other organization, like yours, that we could contact for our project?”

OR

“Even though we will not be able to volunteer with you, is there a possibility that we can interview you or someone else in your organization about what you do there?”

f) We cannot have you volunteer without an adult: “Okay, great. If there is an adult that can accompany us, we will let you know within the next few days.”

Before you get off of the phone, consider asking these important questions:

“When is a good time to call back and discuss our next steps?”

“What is the best contact information for you (email and phone)?”

“May we create out first meeting in January, what are good times and days for you?” (Please, discuss with your groups prior to the phone calls when good days/times are for your group?)

I love how many different skills this project includes, from independent research and web design to telephone and email etiquette. All of these are life skills that will help our students in both education and business. I’m looking forward to seeing how their attempts to connect are met, and how they handle both successes and challenges. Because as we all know, life has a way of going off script–usually at the most inopportune moments!

Happy holidays. I’ll see you next year in the library,

Jennifer Hubert Swan, Middle School Librarian

(Graphic courtesy of Wesley Fryer, under Creative Commons)
As a librarian, few things excite me more than getting up to my elbows in a good research project (second only to getting lost in a good book!) And this one’s really special. In small teams, the 8th grade will be creating social justice websites as part of their year-long Humanities curriculum, “Choosing to Participate.” The ten teams will be covering topics ranging from Schools & Education and War to Women & Girl’s Issues and Refugees. We have done this project before, but not quite in this way. Each team member has a specific role, as set out by our Core (English & History) teachers, SMR and RB and our amazing tech-wizard (and middle school technology teacher) CJ:

Webmaster
– Responsible for creating website design and overseeing the display of all site content

Photo/Video Editor
– Coordinates all photo and video content for site
– Primary editor of video content
– Provides Webmaster with fully captioned content for site

Copy Editor
– Oversees the creation of all written content for site
– Establishes editorial tone and norms for all written content
– Proofreading for grammar/punctuation errors

Research and Content Producer
– Primary researcher for project
– Coordinates interviews
– Fact checks written copy, photo and video content

Each group has a folder in iDisk (we’re a Mac school) that is accessible to the group members and all the teachers working on the project. My job is to help coordinate the work of the Research and Content Producers, while CJ will be working with the Webmasters, SMR and RB with the Copy Editors and our middle art teacher, CC with the Photo & Video editors.

In our first RCP meeting, we discussed the four media the students would be collecting information from: websites, databases, personal interviews and books. In their iDisk folders, there is a sub-folder labeled “Resources” that contains an Excel document with a page for each media type. Team members will log each piece of information they use to create their website, and viola! Creating their website’s Documentation page will be a snap. Of course, nothing is ever that easy when working with 8th graders, but providing them with the structure to make it happen is half the battle.

I’m so excited about this assignment because it totally embodies the spirit of what librarian extraordinaire Buffy Hamilton defines as “the embedded librarian.” This kind of collaborative venture involving a team of students and teachers working together on a project that teaches a number of different skill sets, both digital and analog, is an education model that we have always utilized here at LREI, and will hopefully see happening more and more in the greater education world. Here’s the quote from Buffy’s longer blog post that inspires me on a daily basis to keep trying to create these kinds of learning environments for my students:

“I dream of a model of school librarianship that embeds us in the classroom whether it be the classroom of a teacher, our library space, or a learning space outside the traditional school building (such as virtual). Until we are integrated into our school’s department or interdisciplinary teams, I feel we cannot realize our full potential as sponsors of transliteracy and information specialists who can facilitate and support powerful learning experiences with teachers and students. What if we envisioned the school library as an academic department that partnered and co-taught with other departments rather than as “support” personnel? How much more could I do for my school if I was embedded directly into the heart of instruction either with another academic department, or even better, an interdisciplinary team?”–Buffy J. Hamilton, “It’s Broken; Let’s Fix It: The Traditional Model of School Librarianship” The Unquiet Librarian

I can’t wait to share more details with you as the project unfolds, so watch this blog as we document our hits and misses, and both teach and learn from our student activists!

(and since this is the first time we’re structuring the project this way, if you’ve done a similar project and have some suggestions or advice for me, please leave them in the comments)

I’ll see you in the library (and the classroom! and online!),

Jennifer Hubert Swan, Middle School librarian

On November 16th, the 8th grade was given the opportunity to attend the National Book Award Teen Press conference at the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library. There, they listened to the five nominees for the National Book Award for Young People read from their books, then they had a chance to ask the authors questions and and get their books signed. The National Book Award Foundation provided each student who attended with a free book beforehand that they could read in anticipation of the event, and the titles were SHIPBREAKER by Paolo Bacigalupi, MOCKINGBIRD by Kathryn Erskine, DARK WATER by Laura McNeal, LOCKDOWN by Walter Dean Myers and ONE CRAZY SUMMER by Rita Williams-Garcia. As you can see from the pictures below, we had an amazing time!

April is here and that means spring and poetry are in the air. Our annual Poem in Your Pocket Day is Tuesday, April 20. If you need a poem (and who doesn’t need a great poem these days?), our libraries are bursting with wonderful poetry titles, ranging from a first edition of T.S. Eliot‘s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats to Maya Angelou‘s striking and modern picture book, Life Doesn’t Frighten Me at All. And of course, perennial favorite Shel Silverstein.

In addition, there are several great poetry websites that you and your child can explore together.

Poetry Foundation: Children’s Poetry
Poets.org
Scholastic National Poetry Month Resources
The Children’s Poetry Archive
Printable Poetry for Kids
PBS Kids: Fern’s Poetry Club

And check out this great idea for writing found poetry!

Let me take this opportunity to share one of my very favorite poems with you, Pied Beauty by Gerald Manley Hopkins. I love this poem because not only is it great fun to read aloud, it also celebrates the amazing, crazy diversity of nature.

Pied Beauty by Gerald Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

What is YOUR favorite poem? Feel free to leave the name of your favorite poem or poet in the comments, or share a link to a favorite poetry site.

I’ll see you in the library,

Jennifer Hubert Swan, Middle School Librarian