April 2015

Featured Article

The Connected Librarian: Connecting Community through Little Free Libraries

by Andy Plemmons

Each year our fifth-grade students offer a gift to the school in appreciation of all that the school has given to them. Often this gift is selected by the teachers, and the students are involved only at the last minute to write a speech about why the gift was chosen. If we want to foster volunteerism in our students, we need to involve them in all parts of a project. Recognizing that, I offered some ideas of how we might think about the school gift from the very beginning of the year and involve multiple teachers, resources, and community members. After some initial brainstorming, we decided that a Little Free Library would make a perfect yearlong project. We wanted to build one to place at our school and one to put somewhere else in our community.