Zach Majsiak's 7th grade students at the Alfred Faust School have been analyzing primary and secondary sources as part of their study of Manifest Destiny and The Westward Expansion. Mr. Majsiak [...]

The Cliffside Park HS MakerClub usually meets each Monday but can often be seen in the media center a few times each week. For this year's project, Andrea Romano, the Cliffside Park Media Specialist, bought a self-watering [...]

Pearson Publishing has a large office in Hoboken, NJ and their staff have a volunteer day every year during which they reach out to assist in the local community. In 2016 our district had a lot of Pearson [...]

This October, Maureen Carroll, from the Hackensack Middle School, invited her colleagues at the public library for a monthly booktalk program. Keri Adams, YA librarian at Johnson Public Library, presented [...]

This October, BELS and the Elmwood Park Memorial HS hosted a full day professional development session for its members. The day began with a very involved discussion about the future of [...]

BELS Librarians are involved with so many great projects in their media centers and all their participants and visitors know how happening the media center is. But making sure that teachers, administration, the parent body, and not to mention [...]

This summer, two new schools joined the BELS Consortium, bringing our total membership up to 37 schools. Maureen Carroll from Hackensack Middle School and Michelle McGreivey […]

Mr. Richter began the library media center's year of Digital Citizenship education by meeting with parents to discuss the goals of the program. Parents discussed a parent-child agreement that would facilitate conversations about these important [...]

This year's theme of the Dumont High School Library Media Center is Percy Jackson's Camp Half-Blood. Mrs. Jonson, the media specialist, crafted the majority of the decor and was inspired ,[...]

This May, NVD High School wrapped up their school year with one more event- for the preschoolers. The Northern Valley high schools have preschool programs at each of their locations where high school students from their Teens-n-Tots education [...]

As a Maker’s Day activity, students in Katie Doherty and Denise Marinaro’s history classes stepped back in time in the Northern Valley Old Tappan School Library Media Center.  Having recently finished their study of World War I, students [...]

There are few things as exciting and inspiring as seeing pictures of students so thoroughly engaged in challenging their minds and working with their peers solving problems. Depicted below are students across BELS' 15 districts engaged in an [...]

At our second BELS Research Database Vendor Day we were joined by representatives from Follett, our library catalog partner, and wide variety of research databases including Infobase, FactCite, Gale, ProQuest, EBSCO, NBC Learn, JSTOR, PebbleGo, Scholastic [...]

Media Specialist, Mr. Richter of Westwood Jr/Sr High School, organized students to participate in Digital Learning Day on February 22, a national event sponsored by the Alliance for Excellent Education. To celebrate the use of technology in [...]

To celebrate Black History Month,  Montclair's Hillside Elementary School held a school wide annual African American Read In where all staff throughout the building read a book to grade levels 3-5 for 40 minutes about a historical African American [...]

That's a Wrap! One great idea executed at two great BELS schools. Read more about how these creative librarians showed their students there is much to learn and gain from books- even ones with less than amazing covers. Elmwood Park HS and Saddle Brook MS/HS report with more details [...]

This past summer, many BELS librarians completed an online six week course on Digital Citizenship covering topics such as Online Safety, The Developing Teen Identity in Social Media, and Relationships and Digital Drama. For each topic or module, participants, [...]

The Westwood Jr/Sr High School media center held its annual charity Scholastic Book Fair. The Honor Society students organized the book fair where new books were donated to the Pajama and Books Foundation after purchase [...]

The bulletin board display was a collaboration between myself and my student library assistant. We were trying to think outside the box for the next bulletin board. We wanted to stay away from seasonal bulletin boards [...]

Brook Zelcer’s Creative Writing students plucked lines of poetry right off of the library shelves.  In the tradition of Book Spine Poetry or Book Title Poetry, students selected between 5 and 10 books for their evocative, euphonious, elaborate, [...]

Mr. Richter presents the workshop "Integrating Research and Technology in Collaboration with Subject Teachers"  at the November 16, New Jersey Association of School Librarians conference in Long Branch, New Jersey as well [...]

The National Junior Honor Society has begun a "Digital Citizenship Awareness" program at Westwood Jr/Sr High School. The 8th grade students discuss issues like online safety, internet ethics, privacy and safe sharing. Parents [...]

On September 29, 2017, Saddle Brook’s Library Media Specialist, Ann Hazley, held their 2nd annual Makerspace Launch Party.  The purpose of the event was to give students a sample of some of the projects they would be working on during [...]

I did a decor overhaul myself this year- I transformed my media center (within fire regulation limits) into Hogwarts! I crafted a lot of the items myself, and even did a bunch of sewing for the various creatures you see as pictured below. I'm also running [...]

Northern Valley Old Tappan students created a ‘Book Wonderland’ in the fiction section of the Library Media Center. Katie Choi, Kirsten Murphy, Logan Ruscick, and Susie Knaack spent six weeks in May and June working on the wonderland as their ‘Senior [...]