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!
