Libraries and Student Success by L Stinson

“One door to the real world, the world outside of school, is the library.” (Kevin E. Baird) This is a great quote from the article Why Are Libraries Critical for Common Core Success? The article gives some good insights as to the school library’s role with the Common Core Curriculum. Part of the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) is introducing more non-fiction books to the elementary age students. The goal is to have the students to have nonfiction be at least 50% of their reading each day at school. With the students reading more nonfiction, the library’s nonfiction print collection needs to meet the student’s needs as well as the online sources for research need to be age appropriate and abundant. Not only should the resources be up to CCLS standards but the student’s interests and abilities need to be considered when ordering new materials.

The Librarian will also need to provide appropriate materials for the teachers in their classrooms such as materials to support the students reading and writing skills, in each classroom.

Part of the CCLS is to have reading comprehension programs online to track and provide data of the student’s progress in reading skills. The program that our school district libraries use is Renaissance which coordinates its scoring with the Accelerate Reader program levels.  Students and teachers are able to search for books on AR Bookfinder to choose books that are on the student’s reading level.  Students, parents, teachers and librarians can have access to these  web sites at:

http://www.arbookfind.com/UserType.aspx

https://hosted77.renlearn.com/139920/  (for teachers and students)

References

Baird, K. E. (2014). Why Are Libraries Critical for Common Core Success?. CSLA Journal, 38(1), 7-9.