GEN: Librarian as language arts teacher?

[Amy Hill <hillamy22@YAHOO.COM>]

Dear LM Net,

     I am a new librarian working in a 5-8 middle
school with another librarian who has been there many
years.  We both teach 5th grade library classes
scheduled every week.  She is really into doing
language arts activities as a way to promote reading.
She is reading the kids a novel now and has them
identify characters, word phrases, plots, etc., and
then they do a written response (this is all done
independently of the language arts teacher during
library class).

I, however, do not really feel comfortable doing these
types of activities.  I feel like reading a whole
novel to 5th grade might not be the best use of time,
nor do I feel I can evaluate 5th grade writing (I have
an idea to what is good/bad quality, but as a whole I
am not trained to evaluate creative writing done by
5th grade students.)

What do you think? I tend to think of the librarians
role with kids to be more along the lines of
information seeking, with book promotion being through
individual book recommendations, giving booktalks, or
holding book fairs (there are other ideas as well)

Please give me advice about my thinking about this.

Thanks,

Amy Hill
Library Media Specialist
Tolland Middle School
Tolland, CT
hillamy22@yahoo.com


=====
Amy Hill
Library Media Specialist
Tolland Middle School
Tolland, CT
hillamy22@yahoo.com

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