November in the Library

While November is a week shorter due to Thanksgiving break, it was still an action packed month. Check out the fun we had below!

The month started off with a bang on November 1st as my aide and I were invited to attend the Garland Education Foundation breakfast to encourage local business to contribute donations. We were able to show off our coding mouse and our Beebots. We even saw another fabulous librarian there-Mrs. Fisher! The food was delicious and it was nice to be able to thank the people who fund our projects in person.

After working for what has seemed like weeks, I am finally done processing the new library books! I learned a valuable lesson, which is to always carefully review your processing selections when ordering! Thankfully Follett was nice enough to send me the labels so I could do it myself. The new books are ready to be gobbled up. Special shoutout to my aide and the IRC staff for putting plastic covering on many, many books. 

November is Picture Book Month so our wonderful assistant principal Mrs. Pacheco read a fun Thanksgiving book to the kindergarten and first grade classes.

This book fair purchase from last year has become a favorite among the students and myself. All of the books by Lucille Colandro are big hits and frequently checked out in our library!

Our staff members recommended picture books to the students in this interactive hallway display. It was so fun to see the staff get excited about remembering the picture books that touched their lives.

I did my first i3 webinar of the year over digital choice boards. It was a little challenging doing it on our Chromebooks for the first time, but if you fast forward through the first part, then I hope you can learn some great information on how to create your own digital choice boards! :) 

I attended an i3 (innovation in instruction) training towards the end of the month and we learned about many cool things involving technology. Here we were discussing Flocabulary. I thought it was just for social studies, but it was exciting to find out that it involves all subjects and even has raps for library skills!

I am so excited that we now have our own Little Free Library in front of the school. Our PTA worked really hard to get this project going and the community is already enjoying it!

I used our book fair bonus points to purchase books for every classroom in our school. I even was able to donate some to our Little Free Library. I feel like Santa when I get to deliver shiny new books!

My technology challenge of hunting for QR code turkeys that linked to i3 webinars was not very successful this month, but we will see how next month's challenge goes. Coding club for 5th graders has been great and they have been creating their own games in Scratch. I cannot believe we only have two more sessions left! 

I am very excited that our district's librarians have their own 12 Days of Twitter Challenge going! We started the week after Thanksgiving and it has been a lot of fun to see all the responses so far. Our heads are full of hashtags and Twitter Fairies!

While I did not do much cooking over the holiday, I did enjoy eating lots of yummy food that my family made. I also was able to reflect on all of the blessings we have. One of them is that I get to do my dream job everyday!

October in the Library

So, this blog is about a week late but life (and a book fair!) happened. I am finally somewhat caught up so I wanted to share the highlights of October in our library.

We started off the month with H.E.R.O. week. This a week of learning about being a friend instead of being a bully. My college shirt that my mom got me went great with our superhero theme! We also celebrated Red Ribbon week towards the end of the month, but I was swamped with book fair so no pictures :( 

On Friday, October 13th we had the first ever #GISDLibCon where the librarians from Garland ISD held their own choose your learning conference. Cheryl Taylor and I did a session about breakout boxes.

Next, I did a session on becoming Google certified in the computer lab.

Cheryl led a great session on sharing tips for working smarter, not harder in the library.

We explored new makerspace items from Barnes and Noble. 

Joni Harris shared ideas for collaborating with teachers.

Teri Roper from Region 10 showed up what being #futureready looks like and how we are already doing it. We just need to share!

We had our fall book fair later in the month this year due to parent conferences. It was successful and we will use it to buy more resources for our library.

This is one of the books that I bought from the library. I love all of the books in this series!

I was asked to present at the Library Expo in Plano on October 28th. I did two sessions about becoming Google certified and one about digital choice boards. 

The participants in the sessions were great, even with some technical difficulties!

I also got to see one of my PLN members Megan Tumulty present about instructional partnerships. I am excited to keep trying to form some collaborate relationships with my teachers. 

There was a vendor fair at the Expo and I was excited to taught to some vendors in person. I even won a gift card to Bound to Stay Bound!

Our new books arrived and I am working on getting them ready to go on the shelves. This is one that I had to grab first!! I already read most of it during our second parent conference night. 

I ended the month being the Twitter Fairy and passing out candy bars to the teachers who completed the Trick or Treat Twitter challenge. So fun!

We are ready for November, but also for my favorite time of the year...Christmas!

September in the Library

The books missed you and I am so happy that the library is back in business! I will only be blogging once a month this year and hopefully I still have great things to share since my schedule has changed a million times already. I see the students a lot less, but that just makes it more of a fun challenge to keep reading a part of our school's culture. Please check out some of the highlights from back to school through the month of September.

On the first day of school, all of the students met in the gym during their specials' time. The whole specials' staff was down in the gym to introduce ourselves, go over the school motto, and do some moving!

We used an AVID strategy called team huddle to have the students get to know each other or reconnect with old friends after a long summer. 

I used some of our book fair money from last year to order bean bag chairs. We thought we were getting renovated over the summer so I left them packed up, but turns out we are not so I got to take them out! The students have loved them and they provide a cozy spot for reading to self. 

We had 11 students turn in their summer reading logs so we were able to have a larger party this year. They got a certificate, book marks, a free book, pencil, cookie, and cool sunglasses.

Students also got to invite a friend to the lunch party in the library. I hope we have even more students participate next year so our parties can get even bigger!

I entered a contest on Facebook this summer to win some school supplies and I won! I kept a few things for our library and then I gave the rest of the supplies to our counselor to spread the wealth throughout our school. We are very thankful to Kona Ice North Garland for the supplies.

I went to my i3 training for the start of the year and we were happily surprised to find out that we each got Chromebooks to use for our tech duties this year. I have been slowly learning the tricks of the trade for using a Chromebook and I am excited to do my webinars this year.

We added several new items to our makerspace area this year by getting grants. The students have really enjoyed putting on puppet shows, using coding robots, and creating with the other materials we have added. 

In the library, we do not want to spend much money on having to replace books due to them being broken or damaged so we spend a lot of time teaching about book care. 1st graders learned about keeping books safe while hearing about why animals should not borrow books.

Our schedule changed this year so I was only able to celebrate Dot Day with one class, but they had a lot of fun creating 3D dots. We used the app Quiver to make the dots come to life!

Students learned about being safe online during Cybersafety week. We will continue this discussion all year long, but it is nice to have a district-wide week to focus on it. These kindergarten friends learned about what to share and what to keep private.

4th graders learned about tweeting sweetly! We have a library Twitter account that will feature kid tweets throughout the year. We also had many students create cybersafety posters and we cannot wait to see if we had a winner from the district!

Mrs. Lopez got in the spirit for our Western book fair coming up. 

We had to try out the photobooth props when they came in. We cannot wait to decorate!

I decided to do a major weeding of our fictional chapter books. Our average age of the fiction books was 20 years old and after I was done weeding it is now only 11 years old. Of course, we still have classics and award winners but we also now have a more current collection that reflects the needs/interests of our students. Next up is the Everyone section!

I worked on the Reading with Rodney bus for the LiveWell event and I was so happy to see this student take a bookmark to use as a shelf marker. It was so polite and made my librarian heart smile!

Fall is officially in full swing and in the library we are looking forward to our western-themed book fair October 23-27. In addition, we have some fun dress up weeks in October and of course spooky fun all month long!

 

Summer Reading

Whew! Only 5 and half days left...wow. I feel like I have SO much to do and time is just racing by at this time of year. I am super excited to take a break and enjoy my summer though. My summer plans include a trip to the beach to celebrate my 3rd wedding anniversary, presenting about Google a few times, going to some trainings, playing with my dogs, working out, and of course READING!

The first time I met our former music teacher she mentioned that she loved reading and that she would share books with the former librarian. I decided to carry on that tradition last year by giving our current music teacher, Kami Nelson, a copy of Echo by Pam Munoz Ryan. 

I read this book because it was a Bluebonnet book last year and I was hesitant to read it because of its size. However, it was a page turner and has become one of my favorite books of ALL time. If you have not read it, do so now! It has a great message of how music can save lives. 

Kami gave me a copy of The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto by Mitch Album...and shockingly it was even thicker than Echo! I put it in my stack of books to read, but I did not get to it until a couple months ago.

I sure was glad that I did start reading and as soon as I did I was hooked. It was so neat how the author tied different parts of the story together. 

One really cool thing is that Echo and Frankie Presto are actually VERY similar in theme...plus they are both centered around music!

This year I am giving Kami the book Wonder by R.J. Palacio. I know, I know...I am very behind on finally reading this book. Again, it is one that hung out in my "to read" stack forever. 

I finally had time to read it after I finished the Bluebonnet books for this year. I think it will help spread the message of how powerful kindness can be and we need that in today's world. 

My student teacher gifted me with the companion book with a bunch of precepts in it so I am excited to read that this summer in anticipation of the live action movie coming out. 

Well, back to book fair and end of the year craziness. See you next week for my final blog of the 2016-2017 school year!