Let Your Passion Lead You: with Tara Thomas
The Librarian Influencer of the Week is Tara Thomas. Tara works at Hutchison School in Memphis, Tennessee! Hutchison School is a private, independent college preparatory day school for girls age 2 through 12th grade. Click here to listen now!

Here are some Librarian Influencer strategies Tara shared for early-career librarians:
Plan lessons to work with what the classroom teachers are teaching.
Be mindful of your students and their families when you are purchasing books.
During this pandemic, Tara is visiting the classrooms as a library on wheels. Her tips include:
- She surveys her readers and loads her library cart with titles they would
be interested in.
- She pulls books from the shelves and puts them on top of her book shelves
by grade level. Then, she can quickly load her cart from these pulled stacks
of books.
- She uses a shower curtain to protect her cart on rainy days as she pushes her cart from class to class. Her campus is spread across 52 acres!
Tara participated in the Fulbright Global Education Program Fellow during 2018-2019. She traveled to Columbia.
- You need to have a desire to make your classroom more global.
- You’ll take some classes online and receive things like digital lessons that
you can use.
- It is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and most of your expenses
are covered like travel, accommodations, and a food stipend.
- Her Personal Learning Network greatly expanded through this program.
- They learned about schools across the country during the month she was in
Columbia.
Tara likes to apply to summer institutes sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. https://www.neh.gov/divisions/education/summer-programs
You can follow Librarian Influencer Tara Thomas at:
Twitter: @thomastt1223 https://twitter.com/thomastt1223
Facebook Group: Elementary Librarian Exchange
Instagram: @honeybeehivelib https://www.instagram.com/honeybeehivelib/
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