AASL for Primary Grades!
Looking at the New Standards through an Elementary Lens
Making the New AASL Standards More Approachable
Just as importantly, I was also able to work with other elementary librarians, and together we explored how the new standards would look in primary focused libraries. The job of a SLMS can be pretty lonely and feel isolating--you don't have a grade-level team, and your counterparts, if you're lucky enough to have any, are located in separate buildings. It's important to attend conferences, not only to obtain relevant and necessary information that makes you better at your job, but also because it allows us all time to make our individual islands feel more like a unified nation.
As elementary librarians, we looked at the new AASL standards and scratched our heads a little. What would these big ideas look like with our little kiddos? What does "Formulating questions about a personal interest or a curricular topic" mean to a first grader? Emerald Holzwarth and her table of elementary librarians to the rescue!
Holzwarth created a table to correspond with the AASL standards and shared it with the team at her table (and subsequently the world via twitter--follow her @Emholzwarth !) Then we got to work, looking through each individual standard and brainstorming how it might fit in with our "littles" at school. That first standard I mentioned earlier? That quickly became "Asking an 'I Wonder' question about a topic of choice". We continued to work on the "translation" throughout the conference, and then later when we got home. Using Google Docs to collaborate on the editing, it wasn't long before we had a completed table, each standard's wording modified to become more applicable to the tiny people we teach. Now we could say that our second graders were able to "try and try again!" instead of "iteratively responding to challenges".