Karin Perry and I spent 7 hours with a wonderful group of librarians in the Rio Grande Valley earlier this week. We love being with folks who,for the most part, were our LS students over the past several years. The first thing we did that morning was spread out about 15-20 bags of books we were floating on to fresh readers. The librarians kept asking, and "Really? these are ours? To keep?" they were joyful (which is nt a deplorable way to begin a day of learning together,correct?).
We started the day with some information about metafiction. We discussed what metafiction is and gave them about 30 examples from books, both current and what we labeled as "blasts from the past." After the sharing and discussion, and we had them attain a 4 panel strip where they presented a short piece of metafiction. What we loved was the fact that several librarians used stories they had been told as children,many of them in Spanish. It was terrific to see them dipping into their store of tales they could share with kids in a different version. [br]
We moved on to graphic novels and spent fairly a bit of time talking about how they can play a role in literacy development. We had hoped to attain a hands-on activity, but we opted to go external and view the eclipse instead. Despite the triple digit heat (it was 105), or we were as excited as kids to watch the eclipse (we had about a 65% eclipse in south Texas). Then we head back inside.
The final two hours of the day were devoted to #wndb. The other books we had shared that day were diverse,but we wanted to really hit this topic tough. Many of the librarians in south Texas are Hispanic. Our LS department physically took its entire program to the Valley (Laredo, Brownsville, and McAllen/Edinburg) for 30+ years before moving to our present online delivery. We were well aware of the dearth of books featuring Hispanics. So,Karin and I knew they were interested in diversity. O
Source: livejournal.com