Literature Resources
The Library of Congress has an amazing online reference service where you can ask a librarian a question in real time in a chat and they will help you find online resources to answer your question! (Just don't ask them about local or historical questions as this is a national service and they are probably not familiar with the area).
Goodreads is a website for writing and reading book reviews, sharing book recommendations with friends, see what your friends are reading or can be a valuable resources for looking up information on a book or series.
The library uses Goodreads all the time to look for a title of a book, to read summaries or to find out the next book in a series for our readers.
This is a really fun website to play with that will give you recommendations for which authors to read next based your current favorite authors. When you type in an author's name, the website will give you a map of authors who have a similar genres and writing styles. Based on the author's writing sytle and their use of particular themes, tropes or patterns, the computer uses an algorithm to find authors who write in similar styles. The closer a name is to your author, the more similar their writing style is to your author. Names that are further away on the map from your author may be very different.
Project Gutenberg was designed to give free access to books (via ebooks) recognized within the "Public Domain." Titles such as Pride and Prejudice, Les Miserable, Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe works, Homer's the Iliad, The Odyssey, Alice in Wonderland, Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and many other titles.
Search for books in the world's largest library catalog! If there's something we don't have, you can search for the book, audio book, or DVD online through World Cat's online catalog to see if there is a copy available at another library near you! Just click "World Cat" above to get started!
Local Resources
The Chamber of Commerce supports local businesses and organizations and can often be a great resource for learning general information about the town or local events.
Contact Lesley Pollard, (217) 532-3711
Hillsboro Community Unit School District #3
Contact Hillsboro Schools for information on school events, sports events, school closing, or to enroll your child.
Unit Office: 1311 Vandalia Road, Hillsboro, IL 62049 (217) 532-2942
The Journal-News
Contact Hillsboro's newspaper for information on local or current events, to report an event for coverage, to receive a subscription of the newspaper or to contact them about past articles or photographs.
Contact (217) 532-3933 for more information.
The County Clerks office houses death, marriage, birth and land records. Death records are housed from 1877 to date, marriage indexes from 1821 to the current date, birth records from 1862 to the current date and land records from 1822 to the current date.
Contact (217) 532-9530 for more information or visit their website.
Montgomery County Genealogical Society
Our local Genealogical Society offers resources such as the histories of Montgomery County, Census records, High School yearbooks, cemetery records, a collection of obituaries for research. The Genealogical society also provides reference materials for sale such as the Montgomery County Illinois History and Families book and photographs.
Montgomery County Historical Society
Our local historical society meets at the Harkey House in Hillsboro. Contact President, Janet Carlyle at (217) 532-5642 for more information. Open 10-4pm at the Litchfield Museum and Route 66 Welcome Center.
Lincoln Land Community College
Our local community college provides adult basic education, provides preparation for receiving High School Equivalency documentation, offers tutoring services, helps ESL learners in learning English, and provides various courses to students preparing for college.
Contact (217) 786-3401 at Litchfield's location.
University of Illinois Extension
The Extension offers programs for all ages from gardening, painting classes or crafting classes for youngsters. They also have information on local 4-H clubs and events. #1 Industrial Park Drive, Hillsboro, IL 62049
Contact (217) 532-3941
Contact our local radio stations for information on events or to report an event or for advertising purposes.
Contact (217) 532-3066
Senior Club
Provides meals, dances, potlucks and other social programs for seniors. Contact Lynn in Taylor Springs at
(217) 532-3662 for Hillsboro area and surrounding townships, or Theresa in Litchfield at (217) 324-3032.
NOTE: This is NOT meant to be a comprehensive list of businesses or organizations, but rather a means to providing educational or historical information, or to help the general public discover special community services. For a more comprehensive list, please refer to the Montgomery County Answer Book (2016-2017) where the bulk of this information has been gathered from.
Careers and Job Search
Department of Employment Security
Provides information on job fairs, career fields and statistics, unemployment benefits, or you can even perform a job search or post a resume online through JIllinoisoblink.
Contact (1-800) 244-5631
Provides a Job Search and Classified Ads
Indeed is a great resources for your job hunt needs. You can look for jobs in the local area by typing in the town or city or by entering the zip code where you are looking for a job. You can also upload a resume for employers to find you!
Monster.com is similar in nature to Indeed. Here you can also look for jobs in the local area or post a resume.
A Well Organized Listing of Jobs available by area. A Free job search website.
Don't know how to make a resume? Need help creating one? Just type in your information and this website will build it for you!
Legal Services
Illinois Department of Revenue
Here you can pay your taxes, check the status of a return, find information on property taxes, or businesses can use this website to pay employers taxes.
Learn information about filing tax returns (Form 1040), receive W-4, Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate or file Quarterly Returns as Businesses with Form 941.
Illinois Legal Aid provides information and forms on divorce, marriage annulment, child support, getting an order of protection, child custody, name charge, marriage or civil union, adoption, renting, repossession, Section 8 Housing, Foreclosure, Owning or Buying a Home, taxes, unemployment benefits, identity theft, health, retirement or veterans benefits, traffic tickets, criminal records and more.
Medical Resources
The May Clinic is reliable source for medical information. Here you can learn about particular conditions, illnesses, or diseases and their symptoms, causes, or treatment options. This website also provides pharmaceutical drug information as well.
Montgomery County Health Department
The Local health department has various departments and sectors for information on environmental health, maternal child health, mental health, and provides services such as health education, immunizations, screenings, services for elderly, counseling and rehabilitation services.
Located on Route 185, south of Hillsboro (across from the K C Hall in Taylor Springs)
Contact (217) 532-2001 for more information
Like the Mayo Clinic, WebMD is a wonderful online resource for learning more about particular conditions, illnesses, or diseases and their symptoms, causes, or treatment options. This website also provides pharmaceutical drug information as well.
NOTE: Although these are great resources, the library in NO way encourages the practice of using online medical information for diagnosis or treatment in place of seeing an actual doctor.
Instead the library recommends these websites as a great way to look up information about an existing condition, illness or disease that you may already have to gain more information.
Need help finding a love one a home? If you are not familiar with the area or are moving to a new location and taking your loved one with you, you can enter the zip code and this website will show you assisted living facilities in the area.
Our goal is to help seniors and their caregivers learn more about information related to senior care and retirement. Memory care facilities in Illinois offer comprehensive dementia care, ensuring high-quality services for seniors and peace of mind for their families.
Senior Care Resources for Illinois
This guide will present important information about paying for nursing home care, how to protect a senior’s rights in a nursing home, and what resources are available to seniors in Illinois who need long-term care.
Teacher Resources
As a former school librarian, Mrs. Kolb, the director of the Hillsboro Public Library would like to make your life easier by directing you to helpful websites for lesson plans, project ideas, or websites that can be used in the classroom for research purposes. More websites for research or homework help can be found on the "Children" or "Big Kids and Teens" pages on this website.
Please contact Mrs. Shelley Kolb if you have suggestions for websites to add to our resource lists or if you need help searching for online resources.
Reading and Literature
If you have a student who loves art or always doodles in class, you might want to send them to David Wiesner's website to see a well known and successful author and illustrator's artistic process including sketches, modeling and paintings.
Do you love Mo Willems? Check out his website to send a Tweet to pigeon, see the author's recent doodles and illustrations, or read his blog and see what he is up to.
Jack, like Shel Silverstein is another age appropriate author geared towards younger children whose poems and works would be essential for a elementary school-aged poetry study.
In need of an author study? Trying to get your boys into reading more? Have you tried Jon Scieszka? His works are filled with kid humor and he even writes a series called "Guys Read" just for boys to encourage your reluctant readers.
Are you doing a poetry study in your classroom or exploring rhymes? Check out Shel Silverstein's books and website for some ideas for how to get started or even some simple poetry activities to try in your own classroom.
If you are wanting to give your students, son, or daughter language arts practice at home send them to Turtle Diary where they can play word games with adjectives, verbs, nouns, word ladders, or word building games.
Math
Do you have any students who really struggle with math or even hate math? Tell parents about this resource or send your students to Cool Math to practice pre-algebra or algebra skills at home and get better by playing games that make learning math more fun!
This website is great for providing interactive models for students to better understand math including moveable base ten blocks or Algebra Tiles. Teachers can also use this website to quiz or test their students online on using a 100's chart or using time quizzes made up of addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, fractions, percentages or integers questions. Finally, teachers can refer parents to this website or students to practice basic math skills.
On this website teachers can find images, models, and graphs explaining different math concepts. However, I would recommend Cool Math, Hooda Math or Math Playground for student practice.
Science
Have you met Coyote Peterson yet? Coyote Peterson travels across the Americas in search of unique and rare creatures such as Alligator snapping turtles, the American Badger, Scorpions, Insects or other creatures to inform students, teachers and learners of all ages about these unique species through the Discovery Channel and his own YouTube Channel video series.
Although this website does not have much information for research, it does have beautiful and amazing images taken from the Hubble Telescope of distant stars, nebulas and galaxies.
This website is great for answering all of those student questions you always get like "How Does a GPS work?", "Why does the Sun burn?", and other questions that may come up during class. This website is very kid friendly for students to conduct basic research on the earth, sun, planets, solar system, or science and physics research. NASA's Space Place also offers crafts or projects like Gummy Greenhouse Gases, A Bubble Rocket, moon phases or sun and planet projects.
Is your class participating in an animal studies project? Look no further than the San Diego Zoo Kids! This vibrant and eye-catching website where they have lots of information on amphibians, insects, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles.
This website compiles interesting articles or podcasts about stars. If you know any stargazers, this website is great for learning constellations or even lists when the best times are to see different constellations or stars.
Geography, History and Current Events
If your class is studying the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Victorian period or World War 2, send your students to BBC's Primary History website for basic information to get them started learning on what it was like to live in those time periods or to learn about the culture at that time.
Ben's Guide to the U.S. Government
Whether you are introducing American government to young students or studying for your Constitution test, Ben's Guide can help! This website reviews information on branches of government, how laws are made, the election process, and important documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights or the Constitution itself to review and study.
The Library of Congress presents Amercia's Story which contains information and biographies on influential leaders, U.S. Presidents, Activists or Revolutionaries, Explorers, Industrialists, Inventors and Scientists. A great website for teachers to have in their toolbox for biography studies, women's history, Black History, U.S. President or Explorer studies.
Doing a country study? Want to learn about what natural resources are offered or what languages are spoken in another country? To get started click on a continent on the colored map. From there, you will see a list of countries within that continent and then can select the country to learn more information. The CIA World Factbook is a resource highly recommended by Mrs. Kolb (our librarian) for research. (Recommended Reading Level Grade 7 and up.)
If you require your students to report on current events, CNN is the way to go. CNN reports state, national or even global news.
Colonial Williamsburg's website is great for a 4th-6th grade early settlers, pioneers and colony study. The website includes information on various trades at that time such as Apothecaries, Blacksmiths, Milliner's, Shoemakers, Wigmakers and more. The website also discusses life and culture at that time including what people wore, ate, their social classes, politics, government, behavior and more.
Technology
Teachers! Are you required to teach your students keyboarding skills but don't know how to get started?! Check out Dance Mat Typing and let BBC's typing website be a tool for teaching your students about home row keys, hand placement and basic typing skills. This website includes leveled lessons and typing practice. (Recommended 2nd-3rd Grade and Up).
Do you have students who love computers and want to be website designers or video game designers? Refer your students to code.org for free lessons and activities in coding. And it's totally all free!
Want to teach your students basic code? Code Monster is a great website to preface Scratch with or to use with older students to see what the physical code looks like. Click on the monster for directions and commands on how to change the code. Students can experiment with changing the code and learn problem solving skills about how to fix the code when a piece of it is missing or misplaced.
(Librarian recommended 6th Grade and Up)
Are you participating in this year's "Hour of Code" or want to teach basic coding skills? Introduce kids to Scratch! Scratch is a free software program from MIT that was designed for kids to teach them the basics of how codes have to fit together in order for the computer to read the "commands" to get the images or video to do what you want them to do. Kids can experiment making movies, clips, puzzles or even games by using Scratch. To learn more about Scratch, go to their website and look at recent clips, games or examples posted.(Librarian Recommended for Grades 5 and up)
Coding informational page for beginners. This link will take you to "Qualtics XM" website. It will explain what Coding is and the coding terms that everyone should know.
This website is a compilation of resources aimed at helping women in STEM, programming and gaming to better navigate these male-dominated fields
Everything Else...
Class Dojo is a great way to help teachers monitor students behavior and keep track of students being on task. With class dojo you can add all of the names of your students and give them points when they are on task or for good behavior. If a student is off task or misbehaving then you can take away a point for that student. What you do with the points, whether you do a reward system or a party for those who make a certain amount of points is then up to you. Class Dojo also offers a timer to keep students on task and can help you group students together for projects.
Check out DK's website. This website has beautiful visuals for exploring animals and nature, dinosaurs, earth, history, the human body, science, space and so many concepts! The visuals contain images or models and even include interactive labeled parts. A great website for general student research or demonstration in class.
This website offers information on science such as biomes, the moon, history such as geography, or biographies on astronomers, space explorers, or scientists. Mrs. Kolb recommends this website to teachers more for the free worksheets it has to offer rather than recommending it for reliable information.