The students have been sending in photos they have taken of their Gnomes at home and we are busily adding these to our Flickr Album so we can share the fun and joy with the greater community. Many of the students have said they are going to make more gnomes at home with their families as well. The gnome hats seemed to be the clincher. Once the kids say them they were hooked and worked diligently to produce their own pompom gnomes by the end of the session.
We will add the photos from the 6th-grade activities to the same Flickr Album as they roll in.
Today we were honoured with a special visit by the sub-director and librarian of Maquilishuat School here in El Salvador. During the visit, we were able to show our visitors around the physical and digital LRC as well as share good practices in the running and development of school libraries as resources centres for learning. Our primary focus was on educational provisions for the school community, collection access, and development, community service projects, and digital equipment and resources.
The visit would not have been complete without an opportunity to explore experiential learning ideas featuring some of our favourite digital learning tools including Ozobot, Sphero Mini and Bolt, and Lego Robots, our beloved 3D printers and pens. We also had an opportunity to share our current VR and AR provisions including Oculus Quest, Google Cardboard, and Merge Cubes. These technologies while used by students from 6th-12th grade in certain subjects will soon form the backbone of our proposed LRC Mixed Reality Lab or MR Lab for short.
The MR Lab is an internal project which the LRC Team has begun to develop in conjunction with the ICT department. Through this project, we endeavor to insert AR and VR experiences more predominantly into student learning across disciplines both within and outside of lessons, in a safe, dedicated space, within the LRC. It will provide opportunities to explore both virtual and augmented reality through preexisting experiences across platforms, as well as provide the resources for students to view and interact with their own design projects in 3D and 360-degree formats. We will share more on this in future blog posts, as the project develops further.
As educators, we believe it is vital for schools to work together as part of the larger educational community. This is a vision we share with many of the educational organisations in the country including La Escuela Maquilishuat. Communication, shared initiatives, and support between centres of learning and their libraries are fundamental to meeting the current and projected needs of our school communities and it is important that we explore ways in which to address the challenges facing institutions, together. Our meeting, therefore, would not have been complete without a discussion of the concerns facing libraries today and strategies for further improvement and outreach within our educational communities. As a result, we have also identified further opportunities through which to further extend the relationships that currently exist between our two schools and have planned to meet up again in the new year to discuss additional collaborative initiatives and events between the two schools.
One such opportunity was that of the Sleeping Mat Club in which students work together outside of normal lessons to create sleeping mats out of plastic bags for those less fortunate than themselves.
Here is the link to our Flickr Album of photos of the visit.
A new reading club has launched!
The club, which was created by three 11th grade students in conjunction with Ms. Melissa from the LRC seeks to empower students to select fiction and nonfiction books for reading, discussion, and sharing.
The reading club bears the name of "Between the Linez", a name chosen to reflect one of the objectives of the club, which is to dig more in-deeply into each book, as well as explore different book-related activities. The club members will be working hard to encourage all ABC Readers to carry out the challenges that they are planning and preparing.
The club will meet every Tuesday from 2:00 pm to 2:45 pm in Google Meet. The entire community of high school students has been invited to take part if interested, in this new club and in taking it to the next level.
Durante el mes de noviembre los estudiantes del Club ReciLectura, planificaron y compartieron unos videos con un grupo ni帽os de la escuela Arturo Ambrogi y de esta forma ayudarles en la comprensi贸n lectora.
Cuento: El ni帽o que no comparte, escrito e ilustrado por nuestra exalumna Fiorella Vel谩squez.
We were asked for a tour but prepared an experience for them that we hope not only illustrated many of the functions and purposes of the LRC in an engaging way but also, highlight ways in which they as future librarians can engage members of their communities through experiences which can be adapted across subjects and grades, at a low cost or no cost.
This was an enjoyable experience for all and many important connections were made.
We have encouraged the students to keep in touch and keep us abreast of their professional endeavors. We do hope that the students will take us up on our offer to support them as they move from university to their first library postings.
It is a wonderful thing to hear that we are considered by many, including university professors to be the best school library in the country. The LRC has come a very long way since 2008 and we endeavor to ensure that the innovative learning, resource collections, community engagement, and support continue to develop and improve, in the benefit of our ABC and local communities.
Please click on the link to view more photos from this event.
Written by Ana Sof铆a Santamar铆a-10th Grade Student
As ABC students, we foresee that our futures will be bright as reflected by our context and the educational opportunities we regularly receive. Most of us are confident that we will become excellent doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc. However, not all the youth in El Salvador have these certainties, but most dream of becoming a professional.
At our school, all girls know that they can pursue any interest they desire; yet, outside our community, not all girls believe they can do so. Due to this, in El Salvador, less than one-third of graduates in STEM are female. This saddening statistic led me to design a project to empower girls from low-income institutions by exposing them to the different branches and possibilities within STEM.
