October 2018 in the Library

October was a busy, but fun month! I am looking forward to the holidays and all the exciting things that come with them. Here's a journey through October in our library. 

We have 41 students from grades 4 and 5 in Coding Club! It will continue until December 13th.

Every Thursday, the students learn Scratch coding from UTD grad students. They learned this spooky animation on the week before Halloween.

I have been wanting to do a book club since I became a librarian and this year I finally figured out how to make it work. I had 32 students from grades 3-5 came on Wednesdays during their lunches to discuss our first book-Knights of the Kitchen Table. 

After finishing the book, we had a party on Halloween!

The students enjoyed eating cookies, getting a certificate, and celebrating their success. I cannot wait to start the next book club!

Book projects are continuing to roll in. 

Students from both of these pictures are on their second book project so they earned their Reading Associates Degree!

My morning 5th grade group began a novel study about the book Esparanza Rising. They were able to have a great debate dealing with a decision that the main character was facing.

The students also made amazing AVID one pagers about the first chapter. We are making them about each chapter to eventually have their own visual book.

We took a little break from the book on Halloween to write some collaborative spooky MadLib stories. They enjoyed reading the final products aloud!

For October's staff development, the district planned a day called LitCon for all reading teachers in grades 3-12 and the librarians. I presented twice about our free digital resources.

I also did a book study leading up to LitCon and was able to Skype with the authors of the book during LitCon. 

I have been following Eric Sheninger for years so I was excited to attend a session he did at LitCon. 

The month finished with a wild week of book fair, pumpkin decorating contest, and Red Ribbon Week. I did not take many pictures because it was just such a crammed week, but I enjoy how book fair proceeds afford us the opportunity to do great things for the students throughout the year. 

We have two full weeks left until Thanksgiving break! See you in November.

September 2018 in the Library

The 2018-2019 school year began with our school finishing up construction and preparing for a fresh new year. The Bradfield Library hit the ground running and is gearing up for a busy October!

I started off the year by working the Reading with Rodney bus at the back to school rally. Even though it was raining through the whole event, the bus was packed! I have done the Reading with Rodney bus many times, but this was the most crowded I have ever seen it. I love that so many parents and students were wanting to start the year off with books!

We had eight students complete their summer reading Bingo cards! They enjoyed lunch in the library with a friend along with prizes. 

A generous donor allowed us to add some games to the library's makerspace this year. Students have enjoyed getting to have fun while working on their collaboration and social skills. 

We celebrated Cybersafety week with announcements every morning and classes signing pledges to by cybersafety smart. Mrs. Gonzalez' class won the Dums Dums.We also did a cybersafety poster contest and had several great entries. Our winner was Sofia Ortega for the second year in a row. She will go on to compete against other posters in the district. 

A new addition to our school this year are signs that staff members are posting to show what they are currently reading. I was so proud of our cafeteria staff for wanting to collaborate to post pictures of books so that they could make connections with the students. These posters are starting some awesome conversations about reading and demonstrating to our students that #gisdreads

We kicked off this year's book project challenge and the students were so excited! This picture is just a sampling of the cool projects that came in for round one. 

Our bilingual 5th graders all completed a book project featuring a famous Hispanic and using biographies from the library. 

The students presented their project about their famous Hispanic on our Multicultural Day. Parents, staff members, and other students came through to hear about the famous Hispanics. The 5th graders and Mrs. Valdez received rave reviews for these projects!

Next month will bring the start of book club, coding club, book fair, and other fun!

May 2018 in the Library

May has been a fast and furious month! It is hard to believe that year 10 is almost in the books already!! I did not take a lot of pictures this month because it has been crazy so Bitmoji to the rescue.

We had STAAR tutoring groups and then the students finished the last round of STAAR testing for the year. Woohoo! 

We got our new shelves for the storage room so I organized our large balanced literacy collection.

Music classes and PE classes have had to come to the library for extra time due to field trips and voting so it has been an extra busy time. Our campus is undergoing construction that will ramp up this summer so I have also been packing up and getting the library super summer ready.

We had our first field day in May since I've been a librarian and it sure was HOT! 

I created a digital breakout game for students to play while waiting for field day.

I am trying to get most of our books back and straighten the shelves before graduation madness begins. 

We also have our summer reading bookpacks to give out on Monday. So fun!

I am looking forward to relaxing this summer, hanging out with my family (including my two adorable dogs!), and reading books just because I want to read them! 

Also on the agenda for this summer is teaching some Google classes, working on our mobile library, and attending EdcampLibrary to get geared up for an exciting 2018-2019. 

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.