The question of how we build relationships at the beginning of the school year is one of the most important ones we can ask. A recent tweet by Jess Lifshitz (@Jess5th) really resonated with me as I reflected on how I build relationships through reading with my school community each fall. Jess shared that "I'm thinking a lot about community these days and what I've learned about it. And so as I get ready to head back to school, I am thinking less about the back to school ACTIVITIES that will build community and more about the CONDITIONS I want to create to build community."

One way that I have always begun building relationships with new and returning students is through books and getting to know more about them as readers and their reading lives. The articles and resources I am sharing with you have guided my thinking about nurturing a culture of reading. They have helped me to think more deeply about how I have done this in the past and how I will have to do this in the time of COVID-19 when I will be forced to teach from a distance without students' coming to the physical space of my library that I so carefully set up each year.

Tom Bober's "Personal Reading Consultations to Lead Students to Great Books" has made me think about how I can create a system for meeting individually with readers to help them find and choose books they connect with.

Linda Hoiseth's "Are Author Visits Beneficial to Students? An Action Research Study" has reinforced the positive and powerful impact author visits can have and has validated my decision to make them a priority this year. I'm working with my two colleagues, Shannon McNeice and Dave St. Germain, to write a district grant for a virtual author series for the coming school year.

Stony Evans's "Advocacy in Research: Supporting a Literacy Ecosystem" and episode 86 of the School Librarians United podcast, "Virtual Book Clubs," have made me consider how I can restructure virtual book clubs for the fall. The middle school librarians from my district and I tried to host three virtual book clubs over the summer with limited engagement, so I am hopeful that the tips and resources from the article and the podcast will make them more effective going forward.

Judi Paradis's "Building a Reading Culture" sent my thinking into overdrive! There are so many useful strategies in this article. I hope to take a few and bring them virtual. Another seed that was planted from this article is the thought that many librarians may have not had the opportunity to read Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer or Reading in the Wild and may welcome the opportunity to participate in a virtual book club to make sense of it and plan some concrete ways to adapt the ideas to a distance learning and virtual environment.