Library Make-Over

Our school was freshened up over the summer. This meant that EVERYTHING had to be packed up and moved to the gym at the end of last school year. The library is upstairs and the gym is downstairs. You can imagine that this was quite the ordeal. Eventually, EVERYTHING would have to be moved back upstairs! Books, equipment, technology, and more books! May was a hard month, and August was going to be just as hard! The only difference was that in August, I would be moving everything in to a brighter space with new carpet & fresh paint! Honestly, NOW I am so excited about our new library learning space, I just smile whenever I walk around in it! I can't say that I was as excited when I first saw our library on August 15th. It looked like this:

We have over 20 different shelving units in the library, 9 heavy wooden tables, 60 heavy wooden chairs, and all of this was stacked in the middle of the library! I was overwhelmed to say the least! I couldn't even reach the top chair to begin taking apart our mountain of furniture. So I did what any normal person would: I left and went to buy fabric to cover some old benches! 

They turned out really cute, and I was able to stay sane while our district maintenance department pulled some of the furniture mountain down. On Monday, I had a few librarians come over to help and we moved all of the shelves into place. Thank goodness for those handy moving pads! I can't even begin to thank Debbie for all of her help on this day!! It was a long, hard day!  When I left that day, the library looked like this:

Keep in mind that at this point, no boxes or books had been brought up from the gym. We had packed a lot of the books on library book carts, so Monday night we started bringing those up. Thankfully, on Tuesday, my dear librarian colleagues from the district came to my rescue! By the end of the day, all the Everybody & Non-Fiction sections were put on shelves! They were also instrumental in helping with the flow of the library! We rearranged shelves & sections until it felt right! I could not have done this without them!!   Tuesday night, all of the boxes were brought up by our maintenance department and some volunteers. 

By Wednesday, the library was again a complete disaster! And again, I had some wonderful volunteers, including one of our sweet 5th graders and some previous Curtis students, come to my rescue! At one point, I even had a school board member knocking off items on my to-do list! It takes a village to put a library back together! Thank you to Denise, Kari Ann, Jaylee, Kelly, Emily & Dalyn for all of your help!

Thanks to WISD school board member, Jeff Geyer, my desk was fixed, as well as my new mobile checkout station!

There is no need to give you day by day pictures from this point because it was a slow process. Since I had requested my huge circulation desk be removed, I had to figure out where to put all of the things I stored in there! I also had removed part of my office desk, so I again lost storage. What I was trying to do was create more usable space for our students. By removing the circulation desk, I was able to free up some space which allowed us to set up our green screen permanently. Teachers & students are already dreaming of ways to use this new tool! 

With our redesigned space, we also now have some reading & meeting areas for student use.

There is a whole group story area for our young readers and a whole group instructional area for our older students. Both of these areas have a large screen with a computer for Skypes, GHOs and project shares.

And the makerspace is still there! We are making some improvements in there also, with some Donors Choose projects that were funded recently, but I'll post that later. 

My hope for this year is that this new and improved environment is constantly in use by teachers, classes, small groups, and individual visitors to our library & learning center! I want students to come in to collaborate, create & connect with others as often as possible! With this in mind, we will offer green screen and makerspace orientation for classes, so that students are able to come to the library when there is a project to complete or time for exploration, and know exactly how to use these spaces. 

Stay tuned for how our students use their new space! And please share if you are a librarian and have a great space for your students! I searched many blogs, websites, etc to try to find ideas and would love to see what others have done, with limited funds & older furniture. :)

Happy New Year!

Last week, while reading tweets from members of my PLN (Professional Learning Network) I could see that people were planning. Planning for a new school year, planning for a new challenge, even planning for new positions or new schools. For those of us in education, July feels a lot like January. It is a time for making goals and changes, for really looking at what you have been doing or where you have been, and then working to make sure that when August comes around, and the students walk in the door, you are right where you are suppose to be, ready to give your very best!

So today, I jumped on board the "Back to School" train! I bought my planner for the year! I've been thinking about the new school year all summer, as I participated in staff development, Twitter chats, Summer Learning challenges, brainstorming sessions with my #Wandoo5 +1 friends, and EdCamp Ft. Worth. But the purchasing of the planner says "I'm ready to focus & commit to ideas and goals for the new year."

Earlier this month, I watched with excitement as our school counselor, Lindsay Fuller started developing her own Twitter PLN and collaborated and connecting with other school counselors. I've shared how being a connected educator has helped me be a better librarian, and she experienced that this summer!  She wrote a fabulous blog post about her goals for this new school year that you can read HERE and sent out this sweet tweet!

This and a session at EdCamp FWTX helped bring to mind one of my goals for the new school year, which is to help teachers on our campus become connected educators. I can do this by providing opportunities for connections and supporting them while they develop their own PLNs on Twitter.  Joining and participating in conversations & chats on Twitter is a great way to become a connected educator.  During EdCamp FWTX, Todd Nesloney Skyped in to talk about his Summer Learning Series aimed at getting educators connected and comfortable with using various tools. He also spoke to the people in the room about creating a PLN on Twitter. Here some more tweets from that session.

Another goal I will have this year is having a MakerClub. Having had a Media MakerClub last school year, I know better than to name this club. The first thing the students did in the Media Maker Club was change the name to Digital Bookworms! :) #studentvoice

 If you've been reading this blog, you know we created a maker space in the library last spring. You can read the posts about it HERE and HERE.  My goal this year is to use this space not only during the school day, but also with an after school club. This club will change each six weeks, with a new collaborative project each six weeks. I have had several parents who are interested assisting with this club, so I will be calling upon them for help. The students have really enjoyed the time they have spent exploring the makerspace, but my goal is for it to be more product oriented, with a mini-makerfaire at the end of each session to showcase the creations of the students. 

The media maker club will also run similarly to this, so that students are learning a tool and then creating with that tool. This decision was based on feedback I got from the members of the Digital Bookworms at the end of last year.

Lastly, a goal I have this year is to collaborate even more with our campus teachers. Each year brings more opportunities for collaboration and more willing participants. These collaboration efforts, like other goals I have, need a specific focus so I will design collaborative projects for each grade level, with the help of the grade level teachers. With these collaborations, students will be taught a digital tool that they can use. While at AASL last November, I listened to Jennifer Reed talk about how she teaches each grade level a specific digital tool each year so that they build a tool box of digital tools. I did a little of this last year, but want to be more focused this year, planning ahead each grade level's tool. These tools will then be used for their collaborative project. 

I am excited about this new year! I'm ready to open my new planner, get focused and start working on these goals! What goals do you have for the new school year? 

Student Review of the New MakerSpace by Sierra & Kayla

Hey, this is Sierra and Kayla filling in for Mrs. Ford! This is the first time that we  got to see the maker space room. It was so fun there was Legos, K'Nex , and Little Bits. This Maker Space room is fun for kids to Create, Connect, Collaborate! In the room many kids enjoyed the Little Bits! Little Bits are fun creative circuits that you connect to make lights come on, and motors start up! This was a very enjoyable visit, I know that everyone loved it. To be honest though, We believe that 2nd-6th enjoy and use it the most! I would not recommend K-1st to use it because there are a lot of higher level thinking tools in this particular area. To conclude this, everyone really enjoyed this fun Creative Room.

Collaborating & Creating During Library Centers

It has been a whirlwind two weeks as we explored our new library centers and enjoyed familiar ones. Students were thrilled to see our new MakerSpace that was created over Spring Break! You can read all about it here:
Spring Break = New Makerspace.

It has been interesting to watch, not only which centers the students pick, but also how they interact in the spaces. Sometimes they work together to create something, and some group work individually. These first visits to the centers have been for exploration and soon there will be opportunities for bigger projects, long term projects. We are lucky that our newly painted shelves are empty and ready to house "works in progress!"

I only wish that there was more room, because the number of kiddos that have wanted to try out this space far exceeds the room's capacity! :) Some components of it have been moved to the tables in the library area, such as the K'Nex.

As students have used the different centers, I have asked them to evaluate the center for interest and engagement. It has been interesting to read their thoughts on the centers and how we can improve them.

 Just as popular as our new makerspace, has been the Rainbow Loom Table. We have joined Shannon Miller, and her students in Van Meter, Iowa to create and collect bracelets for children in Mangalore, India. Our students have been so excited about Banding Together with students from all over the country to collect these bracelets.

The students stream into the library throughout the day, dropping off their bracelets in the donation basket. You can see by the evaluation that they are taking it seriously- no talking & more time! ;)

In addition to these centers, we also have our puzzle table. We now put our puzzle together on an old white board so that it can be moved without taking the whole thing apart. This is great because we actually get to finish puzzles!

Our MakerSpace is a work in progress. We are learning as we go, what works, what doesn't, things we want to add... our original steering committee comes in during lunch to research new things they would like in the makerspace. There next big decision will be a name!

Our first week ended on a great note, with Mr. Clark, one of our student's dad, dropping off a bag of goodies! The students were excited on Monday to start exploring these items! And we are looking forward to reading all about 3D printers in the new Make: magazine! This might just be our next item to add to our makerspace!

 What would you add to our library stations or makerspace?

Spring Break = New Makerspace

Our makerspace is finally a reality! After receiving our grant items from the Weatherford ISD Education Foundation, we knew we needed a space for students to collaborate and create. The library has a storage room attached to it with a wall full of shelves, and this seemed the perfect place to house our future Makerspace or at least part of it.

The storage room had not been updated in many, many years and was definitely in need of some freshening up. After some calls to our local home improvement stores, we were excited to get a donation of materials from Lowe's. They donated whiteboard paint, magnetic paint & chalkboard paint. They even mixed a special "Roo Blue" chalkboard paint for us.

In addition to this donation, we were also very appreciative of Home Depot's donation of paint and painting supplies. We were ready to prep and paint! As you can see by the pictures, there were several Curtis faculty members who gave up some of their Spring Break to help with this Makerspace Makeover! We even had the father of one of our teachers come and paint the wall of shelves and how much better do they look!?!?!

Here are some more pictures of the transformation! I can't wait to see the students' faces when they see their new space! 

This is just the beginning of our Makerspaces, and we are excited about creating spaces for our students to make & create! 

Now to figure out what else we need to add. We have Little Bits, Legos, and K'Nex kits, but there are so many things we could add! What would you suggest?