Think
To direct one’s mind towards someone or something; use one’s mind actively to form connected ideas.
Play
To engage in an activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than serious or practical purpose.
Discuss
To talk or write about a topic in detail, taking into account different issues and ideas.
As a librarian…
I am constantly trying to find new and innovative ways to engage students and staff in conversations about books and reading in both our digital (Instagram, Twitter & WordPress) and physical spaces.
Note: No students were harmed in the making of this post
An idea…
As usual I was scrolling down the @tgslibrary Instagram feed, liking and commenting on other libraries cool and awesome displays when I stumbled across a post by @utslibrary.
From what I could see, the library team had turned a giant chalkboard into an interactive discussion space! All they did was write a prompt and left the library visitors to their own devices! I wanted to know more! So I clicked on the #thinkplaydiscuss hashtag to see what else came up. The result? A ton of questions and a ton of responses from library users!
Think, Play, Discuss in the AHL
It got me thinking… Why not do something similar in the Arthur Holt Library? We didn’t have a chalkboard BUT we did have plenty of whiteboard space! In true librarian fashion I emailed UTS and asked if it was ok for me to do something similar before going ahead with the project!
My first Think, Play was created in October 2015, I asked our students a simple question “If your life was a movie, what would you call it?”. I honestly didn’t think that so many boys would respond, but respond they did! So to make sure they kept responding I tried to make the questions more interesting/interactive (adding drawings, magnets etc). As you can see in the images below, the number of responses increased every time.
Some posts were about books, others were about topics of interest or current news items! For example, our olympics edition where we asked students “what should be an olympic sport but isn’t?”. More recently teachers have started to get in on the action! Adding their own thoughts to our Think|Play|Discuss wall.
A Challenge…
*Cue Macklemore song*…. Kidding!!! But I do want to challenge you (yes you the person who is reading this post right now and thinking that this librarian has a serious gif addiction *sorry, not sorry*).
I want to challenge you to try something similar in your own space, be it a classroom or another library. It doesn’t have to be on a white/chalk board, sticky notes or liquid chalk work just as well!
– Miss Mileto
