February 2018 in the Library

February has been a busy month! Check out the fun we have had this month.

 Our school hosted the Perot Museum staff for our annual science night on February 1st. I was able to work at the concessions table with two of our awesome staff members this year. 

This year, I spread our budget money out and have been buying books throughout the year. It makes it even more fun because we get deliveries of new books more than just once and I get to accommodate teacher request! 

We needed new microphones and mic cables for our school so I wrote a donorschoose.org grant. We were blessed with great new materials to use.

Our fabulous counselor let us celebrate kindness week during Valentine's day time. We had a dress up theme each day and heard kindness quotes from literature. This picture is from twin day where I met up with my partner...even though she is a Hufflepuff. #ravenclaws

On February 19th, we had our second library professional development day of the year. We spent the morning working in groups to discuss our new standards and our job descriptions.

We have started doing book projects this year because of Mrs. Duke at Carvery Elementary so I knew she needed to present her amazing ideas during our development day. She rocked her presentation!

I facilitated a session about different ways to use some technology in our libraries. Special shoutout to @digitallearning for stepping in to help so I would not be presenting alone.

Mrs. Duke's presentation was inspiring...and led to me deciding to remove all the old AR labels from our books. It will be a long, messy process but so worth reminding our students that they are more than just labels.

For our decor this month, I did an interactive Would You Rather bulletin board for #loveyourlibrary month.

We also celebrated Black History Month with quotes and biographies.

Mrs. Valdez' 5th graders created wonderful book projects and I was able to award many diplomas this month. I cannot wait to see what they come up with next!

This one looked so real it scared me and my tutoring group!

This one had a whole scene where a shark was eating a person...complete with fake blood!

March will be another busy, but fun month as we have our Read Across America celebration next week along with our spring book fair. The theme for both is Paws to Read and it has been raining a lot here lately so I chose this special Bitmoji. See you in March!

January 2018 in the Library

It's a new year with new goals. Check out the fun we had in January!

Students in grades 3-5 were challenged to read 5 Bluebonnet nominees by Christmas break. We had 4 students get to come party this year. The students each brought a friend for lunch in the library along with cookies and prizes. Our school winner was Towers Falling, but my favorite was The Girl Who Drank the Moon. We just received the Bluebonnet nominees for next year so I am excited to get started reading!

The librarians attending a Benchmark Universe training to learn about giving students access to leveled ebooks. It's great that you can filter the search and assign certain books to groups of kids.

One of my goals for 2018 was to get book projects started at our school. The fifth graders in Ms. Valdez and Ms. Cartagena's classes jumped in right away with projects about biographies they read.

We are so excited to display these projects throughout the library.

Look at this awesome one about a baseball player!

On the coldest day of the year, we had a rolling blackout that put us in the dark for over an hour. Since there are no windows int he gym, we invited the PE classes to join our library class. The two classes had a great time listening to this new book and then challenging each other (and us!) to many games of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

I finished out the month by volunteering at our district's Tech Fest on the Reading with Rodney bus. I only have this picture because it was super busy all night! Many kiddos took home bags of books to share as a family.

I have to give a special shoutout to our counselor Ms. Green for completing the January tech challenge. She tweeted three times about what was going on around the school. This photo was our school celebrating National Popcorn Day. The Tweet Fairy made sure to stop by her box with a treat!

I am slowly trying to make a dent in my TBR (to be read) pile from the new books we got in October. I was excited to read this one and it did not disappoint. Very sweet story that makes me think twice before just walking by a tree. My husband thinks the Giving Tree is the saddest book ever so I thought of him as I read it. I want to find a wish tree somewhere!

December in the Library

December was a fast and furious month. I love setting up holiday books around the library and playing Secret Santa with the staff. There is just such joy in the world for a little while. Check out some of the fun we had this month!

Author Rubin Pingk joined two classes of 2nd graders via Google Hangouts to discuss his book Samurai Santa on Ninja Day.

Mr. Pingk shared the four ninja powers and taught the students movements to go with each one.

He also gave them a drawing lesson for the aspiring illustrators out there.

Our fabulous music teacher Mrs. Nelson left us a little earlier than expected to have her sweet baby girl so the rest of my team stepped up to put on a holiday sing along instead of a full program. The kids from grades 4 and 5 were decked out in their festive clothes. 

Our shelf elf Bookie flew in for another season of making sure students are using their shelfmarkers. Students were amazing to see him move! We all know Mrs. Ray is too short to reach up there.

I hosted this year's spelling bee wearing my North Texas shirt that was perfect for the occasion.

Congrats to these excellent spellers from 4th and 5th grade!

As we approached the end of the school semester and winter break, we said goodbye to our UTD grad students who were the coding club instructors. It was a lot of fun and a great group of kids.

I want to finish out with a book recommendation. I read this to kindergarten and first grade during the week before break. They loved it! I also took it home just in case we had some down time during the Christmas Eve festivities. My niece Lily and I read this book together. It was approved by her and she is a tough critic!

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!