Welcome to Central School Library
As your student's librarian, I am excited to help your child through their journey to learn to love reading.
Books are portals, maps, and travel guides to new adventures and ways of thinking.
Online Library
Students will be able to access the online library catalog at Central. This means, students will be able to look through available books in their library online to check out during their library times each week.
To do this, students will follow the link to take them to the catalog page.
Once here, select Central School under the Location tab.
1a. Students can search the title they are looking for, if they know what they wish to check out to check it's availability.
To search within their reading range, select Accelerated Reader under the Reading Programs tab.
Now, type in the student's reading level in the AR Level boxes. The boxes will appear after selecting Accelerated Reader. It will ask for their range (EXAMPLE: 2.0-2.9)
Lastly, hit enter and the books within the child's reading level will appear. If they wish to look for a genre, topic or author, just select the key word near the search bar after the above steps. Then hit enter.
Students can check out books during their library times or specified opened times in my schedule.
Links to Free Books and Resources
Accelerated Reader Book Finder
This webpage allows you to search the AR database to see if the books you have at home have an AR quiz. This resource is especially helpful since students can still call in and take AR quizzes through either their teacher or me, the librarian.
National Geographic Young Explorers
National Geographic allows digital access to past issues of their children's magazine. Not only can kids read the articles and look at the images, they also have the option to have the words read to them. These magazines are a great way to get your child interested in nonfiction topics, especially wildlife.
Storyline Online
A website of books being read aloud by many famous people. The readings are accompanied by animations of the book illustrations. A great resource for K-1 and K-2!
Audio Book Cloud
This web page offers a variety of free audio books for children. This website also includes audiobooks for teens and adults, but the link goes directly to the children's section.
Epic! - an online resource for books and other educational materials
This website offers a free 30-day trail with access to over 35,000 books to read or listen to. The selection of books is full of new and popular works that children will love. The website also offers educational videos and other resources to supplement the reading. The program is highly rated and well recommended.
Beyond Reading: Book-related activities to spark imagination
Jan Brett's personal webpage
Jan Brett, the beloved children's author and illustrator, provides plenty of resources on her webpage. Not only does she have a complete list of all her books, she also has coloring pages, printable activities, and craft ideas to go with her books. I also enjoy watching her how to draw videos.
Mo Willem's Lunch Doodles
Mo Willems, beloved children's author of the Piggie and Elephant series as well as the Pigeon books, has begun a series of videos in which people can join him as he doodles ideas, answers questions about himself and his work, and inspires people to stay positive and creative during this time.
The link leads to a playlist of all his videos so far.
Author Interviews - Reading Rocket
This webpage holds all of the author interviews conducted by Reding Rocket. Some authors interviewed include Jeff Kinney, the author of The Diary of the Wimpy Kid series and Lois Lowry, author of the Giver series. These interviews often involve discovering why an author decided to write or even the struggles that the author's face when writing. The connection between a face and a story we love to read is a great way to increase interest in reading.
But Why: a podcast for curious kids
This NPR-produced podcast provides answers to questions kids ask such as "why do baby teeth fall out?" and "how do we taste food?" Because the podcast takes questions submitted from regular listeners, the episodes can often link to current events.
Some episodes may not appeal to younger children, but there are definitely episodes that will be interesting to a listener no matter their age.
Story Seed
This podcast focuses on stories, but not just listening to stories. Instead, this podcast shows the process of creating a story, beginning with a child age 6-12 and their story idea. The child is joined by a well-known author who helps grow the "story seed" into a full-grown story.
This podcast is a great way to encourage imagination and show how what we think can be transformed into something we can share with others.
