Library

Upper House students may develop athletic skills by playing on an extracurricular athletic team. The program emphasizes individual student growth, so all interested players participate on either an “A” or a “B” team. Teams practice after school daily during the appropriate season and include: soccer, field hockey, football, cross country, tennis, swimming, basketball, ice hockey, fencing clinic, lacrosse, softball, and baseball.

The library provides essential foundations for students to collaborate and thrive in a rapidly changing world. Librarians collaborate with classroom teachers to instill in students a passion for reading and to provide an integrated and interdisciplinary information literacy curriculum. The library program plays a unique and complementary role in students’ literacy development as it both supports the classroom reading curriculum and helps students develop their reading identities. Students explore a wide variety of literature through independent choice and read-alouds, readers’ theater, and book talks that bring stories to life. Librarians empower students by helping them develop strategies for independently selecting books to check out and take home. The library program also supports students’ reading and information literacy development through library class in fourth and fifth grades and integrated, interdisciplinary research projects in fourth through eighth grades. Guided by the MKA Research Cycle, a framework for honing information literacy skills, students develop a toolkit of skills to aid strategic research through wondering, questioning, searching and observing, analyzing and recording, organizing and synthesizing, and sharing. The library collection supports student interests, offers a global glimpse of people and cultures, and provides different text formats. The combined use of Destiny (mka.follettdestiny.com), the online collection management system, and LibGuides, a digital library platform (libguides.mka.org/mslibrary), expands online access to the library’s collections.