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.

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!