It’s National Library Week, and libraries are certainly worth celebrating! In fact, April is also School Library Month, so you can keep your celebration going for quite a while.
Some resources for National Library Week:
- The American Library Association has some social media events and contests.
- A PDF with ideas for library week celebrations.
- A printable Thank You, Librarian certificate.
Some interesting things we’ve read recently:
- “There are more public libraries than McDonald’s.” Challenge your students to find out whether this is true — for your town, your county, your state, the nation, or the world.
- A software developer of my acquaintance reports that he took his child to the library for a particular book and was speechless when he was told that there were no copies of that book available. To him, the idea of having finite copies of some piece of information didn’t make sense. Of course, when a book is available through Kindle, Google Books, Project Gutenburg, or The Online Books Page, there’s no possibility of running out of copies. As a class, discuss or debate the question: is this something wrong with physical books?
- Read Libraries are Limited, Obsolete by Mike Hirschey. Examine his thesis and his points of support (a good example of both) and search for evidence to confirm or disconfirm his claims. There are many responses to this article available online, and many of them focus on the idea that libraries should change or that they are changing. Research changes that have been made at your school or local library. Then put students into small groups to plan some changes that they think might fix the problems Hirschey lists. Use our Think Like an Engineer lesson plan to approach the question.
- Many adults and children alike have happy memories of libraries and love them. Have students write or draw about how libraries make them feel.
