Reading & Connecting with Read Across America & World Read Aloud Day Day Part 1

We had a wonderful week full of reading and connecting! It was busy, but since it was our 2nd time to celebrate these two events, it was even more fun than last year, if that is possible! Like most great events, this began with a Google doc & Twitter! :)

Our celebration actually started on the Friday before as we enjoyed D.E.A.R. time and an early Dr. Seuss Birthday. Curtis readers cuddled up with their favorite stuffed animal and read or listened to a story. As I went around the school snapping pictures, it was fun to see the teachers in the older grades taking time to read aloud to their students. The days are always so full for these kiddos, and sometimes teacher read alouds are left behind.

With Monday came a late start for us due to weather, but cancellations for many others. The two author Skypes were still a GO, so I was excited! A favorite trilogy of my middle grade readers is The Ascendance Trilogy by Jennifer Nielsen.

Our entire 5th grade was able to participate in a Skype visit with Jennifer NielsenIt was fabulous to be able to visit with her and have her share her thoughts about the characters and the story of Sage and how this trilogy began. Our students were able to ask Nielsen questions. They were also excited to find out that there would be a signed copy of the new release, The Shadow Throne, put in a drawing for one lucky reader! 

The day ended with a Google Hangout visit with Ame Dyckman! She is always so energetic and fun for our students! What was even more exciting was that I was able to bring in another school from our district. Seguin Elementary librarian Lori Tucker agreed to join us after our other group had to cancel. I don't think this will be her last GHO or connection!

Ame read Boy + Bot to our kinder students and they LOVED it! It is always so much fun to see the students reaction to Ame's hair color. 

I'm always amazed at the kindness of authors and how they connect with their readers. It means so much to our students, AND I can't keep their books on the shelves after a connection! ALL books by both of these authors are checked out! 

Rising to the Challenge- AASL 2013

I had a wonderful few days recently, learning and connecting with fellow school librarians from all over the world. My path to getting there began last spring when I first started receiving notifications in the mail about American Association of School Librarians 16th Conference in Hartford, CT. It would be my first national conference to attend, and I knew a lot had to go right for me to get there. The stars starting aligning  pretty quickly, and I found cheap airfare to Hartford.

My roomie!

A roommate would be needed, so I posted on Twitter that I was looking for a roommate for AASL. Michelle Cooper, a member of my PLN responded quickly that she was interested. Now I had airfare and a roommate! Since it looked like I was going, I jumped at the chance to present in the eLearning Commons area when Carolyn Foote tweeted about signing up. I wanted to present on using Twitter to grow professionally. Of course, I looked for a co-presenter on Twitter and Cathy Potter, another member of my PLN, volunteered.


All of this planning came to fruition this past week and it was very exciting! While in Hartford, I connected with other members of my Twitter PLN, planned fun events for connecting our libraries, and learned from some incredibly talented people. 

Just a few members of my PLN!



I also met AUTHORS!

Author Seymour Simon

Laurel Snyder, my first author Skype

An exciting part of AASL13 was the "unconference" that was held Friday night. An unconference is like an edCamp, which is participant driven and led. Who could imagine that there could be so much energy at 9:00 PM after conference goers had already been going full speed all day? But oh my! The energy level in the room was incredible! One of the groups I sat in talked about Makerspaces, which I am trying to get started in our library. One librarian in the group shared about how she runs the makerspace in her library, and Andy Plemmons  talked about a 3D printer he just got funded on Donors Choose! It was a whirlwind of a night!

The organizers of AASL Uncon

Our Twitter presentation, which was my first time to present outside my district, was very fun and went well. I think we might have hooked a few new people and persuaded them to give Twitter a try for professional learning.  I've now made it a goal to present at a conference again in the future and am already planning with local members of my PLN for our state conference.

Cathy Potter & me before our presentation


As for takeaways, I will be considering genre-fying our fiction section of the library. This was a hot topic at AASL13, with some people having very strong feelings for or against genre-fying. For me, I want to be able to help my students locate materials quickly and easily in our library and think this might be a good way to go about it. As the only adult in our library, and often having up to 30 students in there at a time, it can be a challenge to get to all of the students and help them find the perfect book.  So for now, I will order genre spine labels and begin by putting those on books. I will see how that goes and then decide whether I should rearrange the books.

Another thing I will be working on is keeping the technology out and the projects going during our library times. Jennifer Reed presented an excellent session on using digital tools for promoting books. This was my last session to attend before heading home, and it was one of the most energizing ones for me! I took lots of notes and have already started to apply some of her ideas.

It was a wonderful few days, full of inspiring people sharing ideas on how we can rise to the challenges before us and be leaders and collaborators within our schools. I left feeling excited, energized and, of course, just a little overwhelmed, but definitely ready to Rise to the Challenge!

Keep the Main Thing the MAIN THING

This has been probably the best advice I have received during these first years of librarianship! Debbie, one of my more knowledgeable & experienced librarian friends reminded me of this again recently, during an especially crazy week, and I have now posted it in the library to help me stay focused on the main thing- students & staff at Curtis Elementary!

 

 



Yesterday, as I was wrapping up the day/week, and thinking of all the things I didn't accomplish, I thought about what I did accomplish- I worked with students and supported teachers. So, I was behind in all of the tedious little tasks, and there were books on the book carts, but I kept the main thing the MAIN THING.  

 

This week we:

 

focused on Texas Bluebonnet nominee books with 4th-6th graders and set a goal to read at least five of the nominees. The list of nominees for this year can be found here.

 

 

used the iPads & laptops with 6th grade to try out Geoguessr, a website where students look at a picture and tries to guess the location of the picture.  Since 6th grade studies World History, and will be learning about different parts of our world, I thought this would be very interesting to them.  They loved it, and would bring the iPads to me to show me how close their guesses were!  We were also able to mirror the iPads on the big screen, which was good practice for sharing future projects.

 

celebrated Jumpstart's Read for the Record by reading Loren Long's book, Otis, with over a million other children and adults all over the world.

 

 

 

Jumpstart's Read for the Record® - October 3, 2013

 

Jumpstart’s premiere national campaign, Read for the Record, presented in partnership with the Pearson Foundation, is one time of the year when millions of individuals come together to celebrate literacy and support Jumpstart in its efforts to promote early childhood education. On October 3, people across the country united to read the children’s book Otis by Loren Long in support of Jumpstart’s mission: to work toward the day every child in America enters kindergarten prepared to succeed.





All of first grade participated in this record breaking event, some reading with Ms. Fuller and some in the library, listening to the author read it to students all over the world.  After listening to the book, we talked about how Otis was a good friend in the book, and ways we can be good friends. Students then chose one way that they would try to be a good friend.

created student blogs with Kidblog with Mrs. Glover & Mrs. Wagner's 4th graders.  Students in 4th grade our participating in Genius Hour each week, and I thought Kidblog would be a great way for them to document all they are doing and learning. After talking with their ELA teacher, Mrs. Wagner, we set up blog account for each student.  Mrs. Wagner's class had seen it before, but this was the first experience for Mrs. Glover's homeroom. 

As we worked through the process of how to locate our class blogs on our library Symbaloo, (which sometimes is the lesson for the day ;) ) we first found our "4th Grade Resources" button on our main Symbaloo.

 

Then we located our individual class blog.  Students searched for their name, used their student ID to login and then began their first blog.  As mentioned before, the lesson was more on becoming familiar with the process, and future lessons will focus on content of blog posts, using mechanics when editing blog posts, etc.  I can't wait to read future posts!



One of the highlights of my week did not take place in the library. As I was delivering books to a classroom, I noticed this sign outside of Mrs. Palmatier's classroom door:

It of course made me stop and peek my head in to see what was going on.  Mrs. Palmatier shared with me that her students had written & "published" a piece of writing. They had also created an "Author's Bio" and were going to read these to their classmates.  The kiddos were very excited, so I asked if I could pop back in and listen to some of their stories.  When I came back they were all sitting in a circle on the floor, taking turns reading their stories.

 As each student finished, the class would clap and the child would beam with pride. One of the biggest smiles could be found on their teacher, Mrs. Palmatier's face! It was a joy to see all of this excitement and it made my day! Our goal now is to connect this young group of writers with a "real author" and let them see all that is possible through hard work and dedication! 

So even though there are books to shelve and repair, stacks of papers on my desk, and many more items on my to-do list, I am vowing to "Keep the main thing the MAIN THING!"

What is YOUR main thing? Do you, like me, get overwhelmed sometimes with all of the "little things" and lose focus of your "main thing?"

Happy Reading!

Top 10 List

Our first six weeks is nearly finished and it is fun to see the most checked out books so far this year. The students are very excited about this year's Texas Bluebonnet nominees, so that makes up half of our list! 

Another part of our list are from an author of a previous Bluebonnet winner, Tom Angleberger. He wrote ORIGAMI YODA, which won two years ago and has a great website for kids: http://origamiyoda.wordpress.com/

The cool thing about the Texas Bluebonnet winner is that it is decided by students who vote. The students must read at least 5 books to be eligible to vote and voting takes place in January. I can't wait to see which book wins this year! 

Another thing I noticed as I looked at our Top 10 list is that the number two book, also a Bluebonnet nominee from a previous year, remains popular largely due to the author, Dori Hilstead Butler, Skyping with us last year! How cool is that?!? The students LOVE connecting with authors and it makes the books even more popular! 

We have circulated about 4,500 books since the school year began! I'm looking forward to seeing who makes our Top 10 list next six weeks! 

Happy reading! 

Day 3 of Dot Day WEEK!

Just when you think you have had the BEST Dot Day connection, another one comes along! Today our 3rd graders Skyped with 3rd graders in Texas and Connecticut. We shared dots and thoughts and had lots of fun!

Our first visit for the day was with my Twitter friend, Mrs. Alaniz. After we introduced our school to our friends in Coppell, we showed off our cool 3-D dots we made with the colAR Mix app.  We created our dots and then scanned them with the free app. They look like this, but they spin and play music with the app! We had great time sharing and connecting! 

Our friends in Connecticut had made some great trading cards, with dot art on one side and a challenge on the other. They will be sending some to us, so we will create some to send to them! We shared information our our schools and communities.

Probably high on the cool factor was discovering that the colAR Mix app works through the screen! We had the app, but no pictures (they were in the classroom) and Mrs. Lussier's students had the picture, but not the app. We decided to see if we could scan the picture through the computer screen and IT WORKED! 

The most exciting part of our day had to be our Google Hangout with Matthew Winner's kinder friends AND author Ame Dyckman! Matthew is a librarian in Maryland and helped organize a lot of the connecting for International Dot Day! Ame Dyckman wrote BOY+BOT and has a new book coming out in October called TEA PARTY RULES. The students were lucky enough to have Ms. Dyckman read her new book to them! It is a really funny book and we can't wait to have it in our library! 

Ame Dyckman also shared with us her dot picture, which she used hair dye to create! A fun thing about Dyckman is she loves to color her hair vibrant colors like purple and blue! The students enjoyed her hair, her energy & excitement and also her stories! It was a fabulous way to celebrate Dot Day!! 

There was time for questions from the students, who were very excited to be able to talk to a real author! 

Our Curtis students were definitely interested in all that Ms. Dyckman had to say! It was an incredible experience for all of us! ;)

And when it was all over, the students even got a goodie bag with bookmarks, stickers, and a BOY+BOT bracelet that Ame sent for them! 

I wonder what Day 4 of Dot Day WEEK will bring?!?!?!

Morning Book Club Meets Kate Messner

 

 

 

 

Our Curtis Morning Book Club has been meeting each morning before school to read Kate Messner's Capture the Flag. The students have really enjoyed the book and I promised them a "visit" with the author when they finished. This was such a success with our fall book club, who Skyped with Laurel Snyder, that I knew this was the perfect way to end our book club. When students are able to ask the author about their book and writing, it seems to deepen their understanding and connection to the book. We invited anyone who had read any of the books Messner has written to join us, including two homeschoolers who had read Capture the Flag.

It took us about six weeks to read the book and then we were ready for our visit!  The students were able to Skype with Mrs. Messner early on Tuesday, March 5th for an hour!  She shared with students how she began writing and even gave us hints about her new book, Hide and Seek, which students were given the opportunity to order signed copies!  Messner shared pictures of her community and family, which the students loved! Students also enjoyed learning that one of the books she wrote was actually started on a bus ride home from a field trip.  And there were lots of giggles when Mrs. Messner told the students about her "research" that she does for her books, including kissing a frog for her Marty McGuire book!

After she talked to the students about her books and the writing process, the book club members were able to ask questions about the characters in the book, future books, and even which book was her favorite.  It seems authors find it VERY difficult to pick a favorite book, just like you would never choose a favorite child!  :)

Our visit with Kate Messner was a wonderful way to end our Spring book club!  For more information about Kate Messner and her books, check out her WEBSITE.  


We are now anxiously awaiting our Hide and Seek books to arrive so that we can  find out what is in store for the youngest members of the Silver Jaguar Society!