April 2018 in the Library

It is hard to believe that April is coming to a close and that there are only 6 more weeks left in this school year! April is a busy month that includes National Poetry Month, National School Library Month, and of course preparing for the upcoming STAAR tests. 

I got to start out April by attending my first ever Texas Librarian Association Conference in Dallas! Of course I stopped off at the booth for my alma mater UNT. 

I learned about these awesome books that we can order tons of copies of for free!

Of course I had to stock up on cute shirts as well. 

The following week was STAAR testing round one, but it was also school librarian day/week. Ms. Gonzales and Ms. Fallad were so awesome to send such sweet treats to end the week.

I decided to host a school-wide acrostic poem contest for Spring and I was amazed at how many entries we received. 

This is only a small portion of the huge display!

The first and second graders had their musical performance this month and incorporated poetry into the program. 

I squeezed in time to write some reviews on these books so that we could keep them for our collection. I am so glad that we have a review books program in #gisdlibraries because it gives us new books throughout the year. 

I continued working with my second grade book club buddies this month. We have been working especially hard on vocabulary. 

The students enjoyed making one pagers about vocabulary words from the story we read.

I have also been doing tutoring with 5th graders and 4th graders pretty much all semester. It has been a different experience teaching writing and science skills, but I have enjoyed adding in some reading with those. Only a couple more weeks of this tutoring and then the kids get to show what they know!

March 2018 in the Library

March is always one of the busiest and fastest months of the year in our library! We have spring book fair, Read Across America Week, preparing for STAAR and of course Spring Break. I was finally able to change out the winter displays to spring ones, but of course I was too busy to take a picture and now our displays are Poetry for April so I will try to take a picture for next month.

On March 3rd, I attended the second #edcampgarland at the new GRCTC. It was a great day and I really enjoyed getting to see the new facility. Most of the people I interacted with throughout the day were from other districts and they kept admiring the building. I got to attend a session facilitated by a teacher friend from Plano about Google Tools, learn about reading stations, discuss school safety, and I facilitated a session about Google extensions. 

I won a document camera!

Group picture of the peeps from Garland that gave up their Saturday morning to learn and grow. 

I did not take any pictures of the book fair because it was insanely busy the whole week, but you can see it in the background of these pictures. We had guest readers for grades 1-3 on Monday, March 5th. Our guest author for grades 3-5 was ill so we will try to reschedule. Our first one was our wonderful library coordinator Richelle O'Neil who read to kindergarten with her friend Patsy Swine.

Leslie Sans, President of Dallas Pets Alive, came to read to 1st grade and teach them about how to interact with dogs. We even got to meet a rescue dog named Princess! Update: she got adopted by a great family!

2nd grade was treated to a visit by Lady Liberty all the way from New York. They had great, thought-provoking questions for her!

We had a quote of the day contest and dress up theme days! 

Our Read Across America week ended with a great storybook parade.

Kindergarten team dressed up as Cat in the Hat.

A black crayon and a grouchy ladybug!

Our fabulous art teacher Mrs. Krecklow donated four copies of this book from our book fair wish list. Each kindergarten class got one!

I finished the crazy month by getting a Garland Education Foundation grant for stationary bikes for the library! I am excited to get these for our library program.