Everyday the Lower School Library is transformed into a playground geared toward opening students' minds to ideas, knowledge, and new possibilities. The Library is a place where media specialists work as a team with teachers and staff to instill the curiosity and habits necessary for life-long learning. Starting at an early age, students build literacy and research skills through the use of the highest quality information sources available. Many programs sponsored throughout the year encourage students to catch the "literacy wave." Such programs include the Author/Illustrator series, introducing renowned authors and illustrators to students in special workshops and one on one book signings. Also included are organized grade level book clubs, book fairs, as well as field trips are incorporated to instill a love of literature through a variety of literacy events.

Learning Today

• Smart Tutor is an individualized program to meet each child's academic needs. It does so by providing an automated assessment that immediately creates an instructional program that's just right for your child! So let the program automatically create a lesson program for your child designed to fill in their learning gaps, or you have the option to assign specific lessons for your child. Either way your child will be receiving fun, engaging lessons and you will have access to detailed reports to track your child's progress.

Quia

• Quia's technology allows students to evaluate their skills, track their performance, and learn enjoyably at a rapid pace. Engaging learning activities and robust self-assessment tools combine to provide students with a comprehensive framework for computer-based learning.
  • Quia provides a wide variety of tools, including:
  • Templates for creating 16 types of online activities, including flash cards, word search, battleship, challenge board, and cloze exercises.Ê
  • Complete online testing tools that allow teachers to create quizzes, grade them with computer assistance, and receive detailed reports on student performance.
  • Access to over 3 million online activities and quizzes in 300 categories. Teachers from around the world have created all of the shared activities.
  • A class Web page creator that includes a course calendar and an easy way to post Quia activities for students and parents.* Online surveys for gathering student and teacher feedback.

Accelerated Reader

• Accelerated Reader is an assessment that primarily determines whether or not a child has read a book. The software provides additional information to teachers regarding reading rates, amount of reading, and other variables related to reading. Additionally, a number of other assessments are available to assess higher order thinking skills and vocabulary. Quizzes can be taken on fiction and non-fiction books, textbooks, supplemental material, and educational magazines. As of 2008, there are more than 100,000 books in the Accelerated Reader database. There are three steps to using Accelerated Reader. First, students choose and read a fiction or non-fiction book, textbook, or magazine. Teachers monitor reading including guided, paired, literature-based, and textbook reading. Second, students take a quiz. Third, the teacher receives information that is intended to assist, motivate reading, monitor progress, and target instruction. Reports regarding reading level and comprehension skills are available through the software.

Gale
 

• Student Resource Center - Gold provides a premium selection of reference material, more than 1,100 full-text periodicals and newspapers, primary sources, creative works, and multimedia, including hours of video and audio clips and podcasts.
• Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center is a one-stop source for information on today's hottest social issues. Drawing on acclaimed series published by Greenhaven Press and other Gale imprints, OVRC features viewpoint articles, topic overviews, full-text magazine, academic journal, and newspaper articles, primary source documents, statistics, images and podcasts, and links to Websites.
• Gale Virtual Reference Library is a database of encyclopedias and specialized reference sources for multidisciplinary research. These reference materials once were accessible only in the library, but now you can access them online from the library or remotely 24/7.
• Researching science topics has never been easier -- with Science Resource Center, thousands of topic overviews, experiments, biographies, pictures and illustrations are just a few clicks away and the latest scientific developments are covered in articles from over 200 magazines and academic journals and links to quality web sites.
• Literature Resource Center - LRC Find up-to-date biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods and from around the world.
• Gale takes the guesswork out of Internet research with WEB FEET, a subject guide designed for school and public librarians and their students and patrons. The database is composed of thousands of descriptions of Web sites that have been selected by a team of librarians, educators, subject-area specialists, and editors for their quality, credibility, and usefulness.

EbscoHost

• Newspaper Source- provides cover-to-cover full text for 35 national & international newspapers. The database also contains selective full text for 375 regional (U.S.) newspapers. In addition, full text television & radio news transcripts are also provided.
• Professional Development Collection- Designed for professional educators, this database provides a highly specialized collection of nearly 520 high quality education journals, including more than 350 peer-reviewed titles. This database also contains more than 200 educational reports. Professional Development Collection is the most comprehensive collection of full text education journals in the world.

ERIC

• ERIC, the Educational Resource Information Center, contains more than 1,243,000 records and links to more than 224,000 full-text documents from ERIC.
• TOPICsearch contains full text for over 105,000 articles from 1,622 diverse sources including international and regional newspapers, EBSCO's unparalleled collection of periodicals, biographies, public opinion polls, book reviews, pamphlets, and government information.
• EBSCO's Student Research Center makes it easy for students to search by keyword or by topic to find the most useful search results. Results can be easily sorted by source typeÑmagazines, reference books, photos, flags, etc.
• Points of View Reference Center is a full text database designed to provide students and schools with a series of controversial essays that present multiple sides of a current issue. Essays provide questions and materials for further thought and study and are accompanied by thousands of supporting articles from the world's top political and societal publications.

Proquest

• SIRS Knowledge Source- A comprehensive portal offering centralized access to all SIRS products which target the needs of students with best-of content selected to support research, study, and homework in key curricula subjects.
• SIRS Researcher¨--topical pro/con coverage of current and enduring issues, including over 100 Leading Issues
• SIRS¨ Government ReporterÑresources by and about the U.S. government
• SIRS¨ Renaissance--current perspectives on the arts and humanities
• SIRS¨ WebSelect--a collection of more than 20,000 reliable and credible websites covering all SKS topics
• eLibrary Science- Offers laser-focused science content and tools along with unique video and dozens of manipulative found in no other online science reference product.
• SIRS Discoverer- General reference resource for young researchers that makes learning fun and intuitive. Helps students in grades 1-9 develop their research, writing, language and computer skills.

NoodleTools

• NoodleTools provides innovative software that teaches students and supports teachers and librarians throughout the entire research process.
  • Search intelligently
  • Assess the quality of results
  • Record, organize and synthesize information using online note cards
  • Format your bibliography in MLA, APA, or Chicago/Turabian style