#EdCampGarland

On Saturday I attended the first ever EdcampGarland at Naaman Forest HS. The event was planned and run by the digital learning coaches from the high schools. It was a great experience and I am excited to attend future edcamps along with this one next year! Check out some of the fun from Twitter along with my explanations. Sorry for not being in order, but it is book fair week along with Read Across America week so I am squeezing this blog in. :)

We played Twitter bingo throughout the day. The goal was to get to blackout by the end of the sessions.

 One of the bingo squares was to tweet a picture with a librarian so I was highly sought after for selfies throughout the morning.

My first session was breakout.edu boxes. It was so much fun! I have had Twitter envy seeing these at other trainings so I am glad I got to finally do it. 

There are not rules at EdCamps, but there are ways to make your experience better!

 I facilitated a session about ELA apps/websites. It is scary to facilitate at first but I love hearing all the awesome ideas.The room is definitely smarter!

Another selfie for Twitter bingo!

I helped a bunch of people with their Twitter bingo in my ELA session.

This is a cool app that makes the Breakout.edu boxes digital!

#gisdlibraries was well represented with Delma and Cheryl hanging out in the makerspace area

Mason had the idea to do an edcamp in Garland and all the participants are sure glad that he did!

Prizes were all over the places all day long. This was my first Twitter bingo prize.

I met one of my Twitter friends in person and she was the sweetest. She is going to make an awesome librarian very soon!

 My friends helped me check off several bingo squares early on. Two i3 members and a great teacher from Plano. 

We had to work hard to find a principal but we did it! Ms. Edwards was a picture perfect principal to help us check off a bingo square. I am also glad my fabulous student librarian Carole was able to join in on the learning!

 I did not attend the session on sketchnote, but I should have! This is on my radar for future edcamps.

Here I am faciliating the session on ELA apps/websites. I got the conversation rolling by presenting the website/app ThingLink. It has become one of my favorites since I did a webinar on it for i3.

Search #edcampgarland to see even more of the experience and to see the collaborative notes from the sessions. 

Spring Time in the Library!

Today is March 1st so it is officially time to put away the winter and Valentine's day decorations. The weather here in Texas has thought that it was springtime for a while now anyway. Check out how our library transitions for spring.

Our wonderful student librarian Ms. Hensleigh created a display of green books. I never knew how many green books we had! There are even more waiting to go on the shelf as these books get checked out. I have also hidden some four leaf clovers in a few lucky books. I cannot wait to see who finds them first.Ms. Hensleigh will be adding some quotes about the color green to complete the display.

 Greenery and pretty flowers help our library feel more inviting.

I also switched out our genre of the month, word of the week, and habitude of the month. A new Pete the Cat poster and Eric Carle poster completed our hallway change up.

I have been doing some rearranging in our graphic novels and clearing out this year's bluebonnet books to make room for the new ones. The shelf is empty as we wait for the big reveal to happen in our library. 

I have been collecting the plush animals from Kohls for many years and this year I decided to show off my collection using our big back wall. The students and staff have really enjoyed seeing their favorite Dr. Seuss characters take center stage. 

I could hardly wait until payday so I could add this year's animals to my collection. They are so cute and cuddly that one teacher could not stop touching Thidwick!

The books that I do not have plush animals to go with are lining our long book shelf. There are so many that it took 2 pictures to get them all. The books will be flying off the shelves soon as teachers and students start celebrating Dr. Seuss.

2nd grade learned about Dr. Seuss' life from reading a biography on PebbleGo and then they illustrated a timeline about his life.

Our Read Across America week is next week due to a conflict at our school this week. Next week's blog will be all about our book fair and then the next one will include the fun from our celebration of reading week!

Digital Learning Day 2017

According to the Digital Learning Day website, "digital learning is any instructional practice that effectively uses technology to strengthen a student’s learning experience." Thursday, February 23rd, 2017 is this year's Digital Learning Day. 

Currently, I am tutoring 4th and 5th grade students to prepare for the STAAR tests so I do not get to do much teaching in the library on Thursdays. I incorporated technology into my lessons from earlier in the week so our Digital Learning Day became a Digital Learning week.

On Monday, the specials' classes all combined due to a team member being out with no sub. We used GoNoodle to get the kids up and moving. Also, we discussed President's Day by viewing an animated version of the book So You Want to Be President by Judith St. George.

On Tuesday, the second graders got to learn about Abraham Lincoln using the library digital resource PebbleGo. This resource has biographies that can be read to the students. 

After hearing about Abraham Lincoln's life, the students viewed a timeline of events.

They worked in groups to arrange events in their own timeline of Abraham Lincoln's life. 

Today, the third graders used a Padlet to share their ideas about what they would do if they were president. They had very creative and detailed answers. 

Makerspace Magic!

Our library makerspace has been blessed with many items from grants. I use the same basic information and just ask for different things that I think the kids would enjoy using. It does not take much time at all and the donations arrive fairly quickly. Our makerspace started with some Legos that I won at a librarian PLC meeting, some Play Doh that I bought on sale at Walmart, some drawing books, some origami books, and some Lincoln Logs. Today, all but the Play Doh (too yucky!!) is still in the rotation. 

I was so excited to stop by our administration building to pick up two big boxes of our latest donations. I won a grant from the Garland Education Foundation. I have been entering and winning this grant for about 8 years now. They make it so easy and are great to work with. Check it out cowboys...all of this will be making an appearance during makerspace time soon!

First up, we have more duct tape. The students love making different projects such as wallets or flowers with the duct tape. It has been flying out of the makerspace area. We will have to come up with a good system of making this selection last a while.

These Fashion Plates are going to be great for the students to use as they learn about design principles. We have art at our school so the students are familiar with shading and color theory.

The childhood favorite is back in a reusable format. Students can make pictures with the pegs and then just take them out without messing up the background page. 

I have been trying to get our library some kinetic sand for a while. I made sure to get some with a deep tray because I heard it can be a little messy. 

Students will be able to design their own Shrinky Dinks or use the templates we got. 

Another childhood favorite, the Spirograph lets students be creative using angles and shapes.

I have also been wanting to get one of these Code and Go Robot Mouse kits for our library for a long time because they are so fun! I think especially the younger students will enjoy learning how to code in a hands-on manner. 

Soon I will be able to share with you some of the amazing things students will create using these items. I cannot wait to see how excited the kids are to try everything. 

Pam's Legacy

I had jury duty this week so it has not been a very learning-filled week, but I want to keep my commitment to blogging each week. 

I am glad to share this year's book that has been donated to the library in honor of our former music teacher Pam Taylor. She was Bradfield's music teacher for over 25 years.

You can learn more about Pam here.

Pam loved to read and in her memory we have now had three books donated to our library.

The music-related books will be enjoyed by students and staff for many years to come. Each book has a book label inside remind students to "keep singing" in honor of Pam.

This is a tradition that we will continue in the future and I am excited to see which book will be added next year!

Global School Play Day 2017

Today is #GSPD2017 which is Play Their Way - Global School Play Day - Feb. 1, 2017. A day to bring awareness to the importance of unstructured play without adult direction. Students in the library participated in this day by having makerspace time in the library. 

Some makerspace areas in libraries have specific challenges for students to complete. We have done some of those around certain holidays, but for the most part I prefer to let the students create or play whatever they want. 

School can be a stressful place these days-for kids and teachers! The students get excited about just being able to create and have fun without being told exactly what to do. 

Our library has a new addition-a student teacher! Ms. Hensleigh will be joining us in the mornings on Mondays-Wednesdays until late April. We are lucky to have her around to practice for her future as a librarian because she has already been so helpful. Stay tuned to see some of her amazing lessons and displays around the library. 

I modeled story time with 3rd grade today for our student teacher by reading Groundhog Weather School by Joan Holub. It is a really funny book and the kids loved it. This semester has been busy so far so it was nice to get to read to the older kids again. 

We finished up by comparing fictional groundhogs with facts about woodchucks on PebbleGo. It said that they like to eat pawpaw fruit. I did not know what that was so I brought up an image of it and we all learned together about a new type of fruit. 

I really enjoyed getting to share PebbleGo and the other digital resources with parents at the GISD TechFest last Thursday. I think next year's event will be even bigger and better!

I is for Inventory

This week, I started my library inventory that I do every other year. This means that I have to scan EVERY single book or resource in the library. On Monday, I was without my aide and had a full day of classes, but I still made a dent in scanning the E books. I was able to get quite a bit done on Tuesday so that was exciting. 

I am blogging so late today because I was swamped with laminating all morning due to our school being labeled with English/Spanish words and then I worked on scanning for most of this afternoon. I am proud to say I am near 70% done now!

When I do the scanning, I use my little blue chair that is purposely short for the low shelves. However, there are still several rows of shelves where I have to get on the ground. It is quite a beating on the body and I am glad I only have to do it every other year!

As I am scanning, I pull books that: A) Don't scan. B) Need repair. C) Are paperbacks. The ones that do not scan usually need a new barcode or rarely they are not in the system at all. The need repair books are usually requiring some tape. I do not buy paperback books because they are just not durable enough for an elementary library so if I see ones that have been purchased previously, I take them out of the collection. The exception is books that are classics and we only have the paperback copy in our collection.

💓💓

The life changer in our library has been a wireless scanner!! I bought it at the end of my first year and put it aside. I got it out recently since my inventory was approaching and tried it out for checking in books. My aide and I were so excited to not have to unpack the carts of books just to check the books in. The wireless scanner has made inventory much faster as well because I do not need to worry about finding a laptop to use. 

It sure has been a busy week in the library so far with inventory going on, lots of laminating being done/cut, and promoting our district's TechFest by showing students PebbleGo. I am excited to share more with you next week about the fun from TechFest!