Educators Site

The Lane Libraries are committed to providing excellent service to children and teens. One way for the Lane to ensure the best service possible is to offer special assistance and services to educators of all kinds who work with these young people.

Check out our Web site by clicking on any of the links to the left to learn about services offered to teachers, school media specialists, day care and preschool providers and home schooling families to help meet the school and recreational learning needs of children and teens.

Have you heard of the Ohio Resource Center? The Ohio Resource Center for Mathematics, Science, and Reading (ORC) identifies, compiles, and shares effective instructional and professional development resources for educators. This includes links to peer-reviewed instructional resources that exemplify best or promising practice. It also includes curricular content, professional development resources, assessment, and general education resources to support the work of PreK–12 classroom teachers and higher education faculty members. The resources are correlated with Ohio's academic content standards and with applicable national content standards.

So how does this benefit public librarians? First off, the ORC can give you some good ideas for collaborating with your local schools, or help you discover resources that your local teachers are using – or could be using. Also, some of the resource areas might be useful in program planning, creating booklists, and building other services and activities for your young patrons. The ORC has a website devoted to resources for early education (http://rec.ohiorc.org/) and a section of “bookshelves” for K-2 and 3-5. Each bookshelf is an annotated list of books on a particular theme, with discussion questions and activities specific to each book. The K-2 Bookshelf is at http://www.ohiorc.org/literacy_k5/k2bookshelf/ and the 3-5 Bookshelf is at http://www.ohiorc.org/Literacy_K5/35Bookshelf. Definitely worth a look! The ORC homepage is http://www.ohiorc.org/.

With the help of a grant from Honda of America, support from Ohioana’s Virginia Hamilton & Arnold Adoff Endowment, and the generosity of several publishers, the Ohioana Library has been able to begin to share some of the outstanding literature written by Ohioans with Ohio school children. It is our belief that children will enjoy learning and will be inspired by writers and illustrators that share a similar background with them; writers and artists who also have made their homes in Ohio.

The Ohioana Library Travels the Underground Railroad project contains tools designed to provide resources for students, teachers, and librarians to augment and enhance the standard classroom curriculum.

The goal of this educational kit is to reach out to students and teachers throughout the state of Ohio. Educators will be able to use this kit to teach about the Underground Railroad and its significance in Ohio. Resources, information, documents, classroom book sets, videos, lesson plans, and other materials have been included to enable teachers to select appropriate materials and ideas in order to reach children of all learning styles in all disciplines of study, including math, geography, social studies, language arts, art, and music.