Check Out Our Collection of Resources to Start the School Year Off Right

The alarm is going off way too soon. The kiddos don’t want to get out of bed. There’s no time for a big breakfast, so it’s cereal and bagels … yet again. Traffic’s a nightmare, and you’re running late. You screech into the school drop off line, on two wheels and with three minutes to spare.

Happy first day of school, everyone!

We get it. Heading back to the classroom can be an exciting time for you and your family, but it can also be incredibly stressful.

And we’ve got your back.

We’ve put together some resources to help make your back-to-school season a little bit easier and help you get the most out of these early days in the school year.

Today, we’re sharing some things that Nashville’s teachers and educators will come to love.

Limitless Libraries Educator’s Card

School libraries are great. And — call us biased — as librarians, we think one of the hallmarks of a great school is a well-stocked library that has something for every student's tastes.

Actually, go ahead and call us very biased. We love our local school libraries so much that we share our catalog of two million-plus books, research databases, curriculum resources, and other materials with more than 86,000 Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) students, educators, and school librarians.

They go to their school library to browse and borrow from NPL’s catalog, and our staff delivers school orders every weekday.

We’ll also go ahead and confess: We are way, way, way biased about teachers. In other words: we think they’re heroes.

And that’s where our Limitless Libraries Educator’s Card comes in.

MNPS teachers and educators can borrow up to 100 of NPL’s books, movies, and other materials delivered to their school — thanks to Limitless Libraries — and hold on to them for up to six weeks in most cases.

Yes, a hundred...

And, guess what? If you’re an MNPS teacher, you’ve already got your Educator’s Card! Your six-digit employee ID doubles as your library card number, while the current school year is the default PIN (2023 is this year’s PIN, for example).

To learn more about your Educator’s Card, visit our Limitless Libraries website.

Conscious Child Kits

Talking to kids about topics like race, identity, and justice can be an uplifting, but challenging, experience.

That’s why NPL cultivated our Conscious Child Kits for educators.

Each kit focuses on a different topic, with materials geared to an age-appropriate reading level. The full lineup of kits include:

• Joy and Self-Love (ages 4–7)
• Identity and Belonging (ages 4–7 and 8–11)
• Solidarity and Activism (ages 4–7 and 8–11)
• Immigration and Refugees (ages 4–7 and 8–11)
• Justice and Systemic Racism (ages 8–11)

Each kit comes with a selection of books about that kit’s topic, discussion questions for each book, and recommendations for further reading.

Library Concierge

As a teacher, there may come a time when you’re ready to teach a particular topic but don’t know which books would be best. Or maybe you just finished reading a book with your class, and they loved it so much that you’d like to find others just like it.

Enter Library Concierge, our personalized shelf-browsing service where our expert librarians “shop” for you based on your preferences.

You tell us what you want; we put together a custom stack of books and other materials for you. You pick them up when you want, at any of our 21 locations across Nashville.

Just fill out the form, give us a little time, and we’ll find your next favorite reads for you.

Read More in Our Back to School Series

Like what you just read? We’ve also got resources geared for: 

• Elementary school students
• Middle school students