During elementary Early Release days, librarians are invited to spend the afternoon at Northside Learning Center to create library unit/lesson plans with a science theme.

On October 12, 2007, thirty one elementary librarians began the task of creating science lessons based on the NISD Science curriculum, incorporating library research and resources wherever possible.  Facts on File, one of our district databases contains Curriculum Resource Center Junior Edition with many science diagrams.  These are especially helpful in teaching students to discriminate details they see in a diagram and interpret their findings, a typical question type found on the TAKS test.

Librarians will continue meeting on Early Release days.  The lessons, when completed, will be posted in the district Curriculum Management System.

Leadership Triads of campus administrators, CITs, and librarians participated in a digital age “think tank” to explore selected content area TEKS with a technology twist!  Six elementary sessions were held in September, two middle school and one high school session were held in early October. 

The Triads were given a newspaper article describing an oil spill on the Texas Gulf coast.  The article and corresponding research links were from NISD databases.  Class Blogmeister, a district approved blogging tool, incorporated the research links and provided a way for the participants to respond to questions and participants expressed many ideas for ways to use this Web2.0 tool at their campuses!