By Beth Lyons
CSL Journal is highlighting this paper, which was presented at the seventh Treasure Mountain Canada Symposium, held in partnership with the British Columbia Teacher-Librarians’ Association in October, 2022, in New Westminster, BC.
The 2020-2022 school years were marked with a great deal of change, upheaval and constant re-imagining of the system for all of the community members involved in education. COVID restrictions, online learning, closed classrooms and re-adjusting to a return to in-person learning for the majority of our students and staff took precedence over everything. As we worked to re-imagine what the Larkspur LLC might be in this “new normal” we constantly looked to ensure that we were centring the needs of students and their families. We reflected on our collection curation, choice of books for read alouds and maker materials to provide “mirrors, windows and doors” (Sims Bishop) for both students and educators as they interacted within the library space, both in-person and virtually. It is my hope that the Larkspur LLC and the library programming provided an opportunity for growth, for reconnection and most of all, joy.
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Beth Lyons is a mom, a wife, and a reader who loves to be outside. She is an educator who has taught in classrooms from Grade 3 to Grade 8 and spent the last 5 years as a teacher-librarian in the Peel District School Board. She has returned to the classroom as she believes all pedagogical practice should be rooted in classroom experience. Beth is passionate about inquiry-based learning and cultivating a maker mindset with learners. She reflects and shares about her own learning journey as an educator and a teacher-librarian on her blog The Librarian’s Journey and on Twitter (@MrsLyonsLibrary). Currently, Beth is serving as Ontario School Library Association (OSLA) President, is a contributor to both The Teaching Librarian Magazine and the Canadian School Libraries Journal, and is the host for the podcast Read Into This (@into_read).