March 2019 in the Library

March was a short month due to Spring Break and testing, but it is also one of our busiest months in the library. I keep forgetting to take pictures of my displays, but we celebrated Women's History Month and all things green. Check out the exciting recap of what I did remember to take pictures of!

Besides our spring book fair, we also celebrated reading by dressing up each day to match a different book. There was also a genre contest each day.

March 4th was our annual reading celebration day. The kindergartners Skyped with author JoAnn Sky. She is the author of a great book called Santa's Dog. The kids loved hearing the story and what inspired her to write it. Even Coach T asked her a question!

Second grade got to hear Mrs. Martinez from the Digital Learning Team read My Technology Tail and discuss digital citizenship. It was a great experience for the students!

Fourth grade did a Skype call with author Mike Graf. He discussed his nonfiction books and took students on a photographic tour of national parks. It was very informative and cool!

First graders loved their Skype with author Rebecca J. Gomez. They had a lot of questions and comments about Moose from the story!

Our new SRO Officer Price stopped by to read a nonfiction book about police to our third graders. We appreciate him stopping by and showing us the tools that police use.

Friday, March 8th was our annual storybook character parade. Prek had a blast dressing up!

My team of fishes from One Fish Two Fish! We had two black fishes :) 

Look at all of these amazing storybook characters!

I earned my Masters degree from #GISDchat University! It's my second Masters, but it still meant a lot...trying to get that first doctorate before school ends!

The 5th grade STAAR tests are rapidly approaching so I have been working with students on reading about science topics using our balanced literacy books. They are amazing! We also incorporated AVID by doing a one-pager about electricity. 

I spent 6 weeks working on the course to become a Virtual Digital Leader for GISD. It was a really great course that I mined a lot of info from to share with our staff and students for next year. 

The month ended by getting this awesome grant from the Garland Education Foundation! I am so excited because we are going to purchase a novel for the whole school to read together and do activities with throughout next school year. I had hoped to get it last semester, but I am glad I tried again. We will be all set for August!

April starts today and that's no April Fools joke! I cannot wait to see what happens in the library as the year winds down.:) 

February 2019 in the Library

February was a busy month with tons of different activities going on. Check out just a snippet of the fun we had in the library this month!

We began the month by celebrating World Read Aloud day with a winter favorite!

I used some of our fall book fair Scholastic points to get 100 books to give away on the 100th day of school. It was great to see kids so excited, but sad when the cart was empty.

Our Bunnicula lunch book club for 3-5 graders wrapped up on February 13th. We celebrated the kids' success with a cookie party. 

GISD nutrition donated a Dr. Seuss book to give away and this special girl was chosen by her teacher due to her love of Dr. Seuss books!

The Brook Dale Assisted Living Center donated this bench to our school. It is handmade! 

The librarians enjoyed a full day training with information about budgets and learning about the new TEKS for ELA.

It was great to have time to examine the new TEKS' strands so we are prepared for next year!

I did a 5 week afterschool book club for 1st and 2nd graders. We loved reading More-Igami and creating cool fish out of paper.

Since February is Dental Health month, we read about keeping our teeth healthy and then made posters with tips on them. 

We read about the White House and then they designed their own colorful houses.

For Valentine's Day, our club read a festive book and made 3D cards.

Our final club meeting was full of the students creating their own exercise routines to celebrate Healthy Heart Month. 

Since it was also Digital Learning Day, we filmed the routines on an iPad.

My 5th grade novel study group did a Kahoot about Wonder on Digital Learning day too. 

We finished our novel study by watching the movie Wonder and comparing it to the book. These kids definitely earned their popcorn and movie party!

March is already half-way through and it has been a whirlwind! 

January 2019 in the Library

January has been fast and furious! I started out by doing inventory on the library for the first week and then continued the month with lots of reading activities.

There were three students who read at least 5 of the Bluebonnet Book Award nominees. These 4th graders got to celebrate their accomplishment with a voting party. Our school's winner was The Unlucky Lottery Winners of Classroom 13. 

There are several more books in the Classroom 13 series that have been released. I have been trying to read them quickly before I put them on the shelves. They are all funny!

I also read this book this month. I visited Galveston a couple summers ago and find the history of the great hurricane very interesting. This was my first Magic Tree House book to read. I loved it!

My third, fourth, and fifth grade book club started up again with a new book...Bunnicula!

Students discussed the book at lunch while using our exercise bikes.

We did a gallery walk to discuss questions about the book.

We have also done a survey about topics from the book.

We have two more sessions left!

My morning group of fifth graders love doing debates. They are listening carefully to the other side's points so that they can respond. We started reading the book Wonder and this was the first debate about whether August should go to school. 

I attended a full day i3 training towards the end of the month. It was great to really have time to digest new tech tools and ideas. I cannot wait to share adaptive Google Forms with the staff. Plus, we got cool Lego people to hang out with. Mine had red hair and was wearing my favorite color...fate!

As we wrap up the month, we are approaching the 100th day of school. I am giving away 100 books to students and staff members up February 4th's 100th day of school. Here were the first two winners to come and select a brand new book to keep. Think of all the stories that can be told and the books that can be read in the next 100 days!

December 2018 in the Library

December is one of my favorite months. Our school calendar had us go an extra week in December this year so we had even more time for learning and activities!

Our book study of Esperanza Rising led us to make some connections to Cesar Chavez.

Our novel study concluded with a bag project and a party!

The kids did an awesome job on their final products.

We had a schoolwide storybook gingerbread character contest. It was so cool to see the creative entries! It sure made judging hard though. This is only a sample of the many entries.

I won our district's i3 Goosechase contest for the fall semester. Goosechase is an online scavenger hunt type app. It is a lot of fun!

I also did the district's #GISDEdTechMas twitter contest for December and received these microfiber cloths to use with our technology!

The last day before break brought our annual holiday sing-along hosted by the specials' team. My hard-working team made it a great event for the students.