Why Support School Libraries?
School libraries support you! The library is there as an invaluable resource for students and teachers for information and technology. When a library is led by one or more full-time professionals with a support staff to free them from clerical duties, the collection is that much more rich and varied, the library is available to students before and after school, and it becomes a haven for teacher-librarian collaboration.
Library Media Specialists work hard to align their collection to the curriculum. This is a great resource to students who are looking for books for their projects and reports. Teachers, too, can take advantage of a rich library collection to use books to introduce a unit or concept. For example, the picture book What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? By Steven Jenkins and Robin Page could be used with 1st- or 2nd-graders to introduce a unit on animal characteristics. This creative book about animals makes a great guessing game with young children that can lead into a lesson on animals in the classroom or a lesson on fact-finding in a library. LMS's are a wealth of ideas that they combine with a thorough knowledge of their collection.
A good school library collection also has a wide selection of recreational reading materials. LMS's along with reading and language arts teachers are committed to encouraging young people to read for fun. This means that we can't forget about the joke books, the drawing books, the fantasy fiction, the mysteries, etc. These are the books that kids want to read, the books that will help them to develop a love of reading; and these books have just as much importance in a library as the science, math, and history books that help students to meet the state standards in each subject level.
