SLJ Summit 2012 - resources to follow

This past weekend the School Library Journal held its 5th annual SLJ Summit. This year's theme was Advocacy and the e-volution: Creating stronger schools through stronger libraries. I followed the conversation through Twitter posts and was very happy that SLJ has already started posting resources to share with the broader world.

I am particularly interested in how librarians can be at the forefront of the Common Core conversation. My own elementary school is very interested in how the CCSS will be adopted locally, particularly in math. Our district recently adopted the TCRWP curriculum for reading at the elementary schools, and so there is a general feeling that the CCSS does not add much new. But I think that it will ask elementary students to continue focusing specifically on the text as they draw conclusions about their reading. There will certainly be continued focus on increasing our students' nonfiction reading at the elementary level, preparing them for moving into strong nonfiction reading at the upper levels.

The SLJ Summit had a special focus on Saturday, the "summit within the summit" on librarians at the center of the Common Core. On the resource page, SLJ includes an interesting handout from Dr. Mary Ann Capiello on Nonfiction at the Fore of the Common Core. Dr. Capiello is a professor at the Graduate School of Education, Lesley University and she is one of the authors of the Classroom Bookshelf Blog. She is also part of the blogging team at The Uncommon Core, another blog I am adding to my blog reader. This resource is an excellent snapshot of ways we can get the word out to teachers and our learning communities about using high-quality nonfiction trade books to support Common Core State Standards.

Two other resources I want to mark to follow up at a further point in time are:

SLJ's Webinar series on the Common Core

SLJ's resource page on the Common Core