Money Smart Week, which will be celebrated this year starting on April 21, is a national initiative of ALA and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago to provide financial literacy programming to help members of your community better manage their personal finances.
But teaching financial literacy does not have to happen only during April. Here are a few ideas to help promote financial literacy and make money smart students any time of year.
A few months ago on Programming Librarian, I talked about asking a trivia question as part of your passive programming. Now, I've taken it a step further to create a Trivia Master Challenge that encourages students to search the library’s catalog, explore our nonfiction section, and learn how to search successfully within a book.
As an academic institution on the semester system, Banned Books Week tends to be the first big, multi-day event of the programming cycle for the staff at the William H. Hannon Library at Loyola Marymount University. Outside of First-Year Orientation, this is one of our first opportunities to make an impression on our students.
At a small, rural library with no paid staff, one person (me) is in charge of all library operations: collection development, program implementation and marketing. I make use of as many free resources as I can to keep our library relevant.
Passive programs can be a great way to regularly attract students into the library without having planned, specific events. Pick a corner of the library that can be designated for these drop-by activities, set out the supplies and some instructions, and let it go! Here are a few of my go-to passive programs.
The William H. Hannon Library hosts over 40 programs every year. Like many colleges and universities, Loyola Marymount University has multiple public calendars, bulletin boards and online spaces where students, faculty and staff go to find information about upcoming events. To rise above the surfeit of campus programming options for our users, it's important to make sure each space is populated with library programming information in a timely fashion.
Like the increasingly popular "escape rooms" — in which players solve a series of puzzles to break out of a room — Breakouts use a compelling story, time limit, and series of puzzles to create an interactive game. But instead of breaking out of a locked room, students must work together to break into a tightly locked box before the timer runs out. Puzzles lead to the combinations for the different types of locks, and many games also include a digital element.
Ursula Le Guin, in her meditation on the power of speech, says, "Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."
It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. Or an axle. Or a 24-tooth crown gear. Or all of them in one sitting.
That was the challenge we faced here at Mid-Continent Public Library as we planned to make LEGO WeDo kits available for programs at our 31 branches. How do you circulate 40 kits throughout the system without losing most of the pieces — and your mind?
The building blocks of physical literacy begin at birth as we explore our environments with our bodies — but that doesn’t mean our skills are fixed at a certain age! Physical literacy skills can be acquired and improved throughout the lifetime.
