K-12 Students and COVID-19

Schools and childcare centers across the country and country have been forced to close to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19).

Poway Unified School District has a COVID-19 update website with suggestions and information for families of students within the school district.

The Smithsonian Institution and Library of Congress have come up with wide-ranging digital resources, which includes material for students of all ages and brings with it the credibility of two of our nation's preeminent educational institutions:

Smithsonian Learning Lab: A free, interactive platform for discovering millions of authentic digital resources and creating content with online tools. The Learning Lab has an immense amount of content, and the Getting Started guide is a helpful resource. In addition, the weekly Smithsonian Activities Choice Boards features weekly highlights for various subject areas. Issue One and Issue Two are available now. New issues are released each Monday. 

Smithsonian Open Access: Allows students to download, share and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images without asking permission because they have been released into the public domain. 

Smithsonian Digital Volunteers Program: Allows the general public to make things like historical documents and biodiversity data more accessible. Students can join fellow volunteers to add more field notes, diaries, ledgers, logbooks, manuscripts, biodiversity specimen labels and more to the collection. 

Sidedoor: A podcast for students that enlists the help of biologists, archaeologists, zookeepers and astrophysicists to tell engaging and educational stories.

Student Discovery Sets: Puts primary sources in student’s hands by bringing together historical artifacts and documents on a wide range of topics. The Student Discovery Sets are free on iBooks.

Current Exhibitions: The Library has several current exhibitions available online, including ones on Rosa Parks, the Nineteenth Amendment, comic art and more.

Digital Collections: Over 400 digital collections are available online, featuring content from U.S. Presidents, musicians, inventors, historic newspapers and more.

By the People: A crowdsourcing initiative that allows anyone to volunteer to improve access to history by transcribing, reviewing and tagging Library of Congress documents.

Classic children’s books: Available for free online via the Library website.

The Library of Congress’ YouTube channel: Contains a wide range of author programming, as well as content from scholars and musicians.

Ask a Librarian: The tool remains available to the public, with Librarians available to answer questions and provide research assistance.

The Library’s National Screening Room: Showcases the Library’s vast moving image collection. It is designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, freely accessible to viewers worldwide.