It has been a LONG time since I posted one of these, but thought that this would be a good week to get back in the swing of things. 

One of the big things we had going on this week was the ice cream party/voting for our State Book Award, the Golden Sowers. Students who had read at least 4 of the titles were able to come in with their lunches, grab ice cream, vote, and watch a movie in the library. We sent our votes in to be counted with the rest of the state and can't wait to see who the winners are!

We also did staff development with all staff members on using their teacher iPad and utilizing the iPad cart. The staff had lots of good questions about iPad functionality and our tech coordinator was also able to explain the process for requesting and adding specific apps. More to come on the iPads as we begin the tech cohort for next year.

We also had Band students come in to do research in preparation for the upcoming 5th grade tours. The band teacher is changing up the format for the 5th grade tours and wanted the current students to give presentations/demonstrations on their instruments along with background information. The research went well and it was fun to work with a teacher who has never utilized the library before. 

Finally, I've been doing some reading and with the snow forecast (yes, SNOW) for the weekend, I have some books stacked up. Hoping to get to these this weekend:

We were BUSY this week in the library! We had book talks/checkouts with the 7th graders on Monday, book tastings with the 8th graders on Thursday, and Makerspace Club after school. 

For the book talks, I started prepping on Friday. I knew that I had 5 different class periods of students coming in, and I wanted to make sure they all had ample books to hear about it. There is nothing worse than doing book talks and realizing by the 2nd or 3rd class that you are out of books since they all get checked out after you talk them up. So Friday, I pulled books from each genre and started making piles for each class. I planned to book talk a title from each genre and also had an extra couple pulled in case there was a spike in interest. I also wanted to make some notes for myself to use as I was book talking. I had read about half of the books I decided to highlight. For the others, I relied on these amazing websites for help:
Booktalks Quick and Simple
Be a Better Booktalker

This is what my work station looked like during this process:

For the book tastings, I did a variation of the speed dating activities I have done in the past. I really wanted to highlight the genrefication of the library AND expose the students to a large number of titles in a short amount of time. To prepare, I looked over some recent blog posts (including THIS ONE from Stony Evans and Kaitlyn Price) and decided to do a low key version. To begin, I did a quick 3 slide presentation explaining the book tasting (they got to pick an appetizer, salad, entree, and dessert course) and their menu options (the different genres). Students then got a menu card to fill out with their course choices and spots for notes and titles they wanted to remember. After that kids got 5-7 minutes for each course to peruse books. I had approximately 15-20 titles at each table/station for the kids to look through. 

During this activity, there was a TON of talk at the tables as students recommended different titles to each other. Lots of them found books to check out and others found titles they would come back to the next time they needed a book.

Here are a few pics from the process:

Finally, we also had Makerspace Club this week. Kids got to use the 3D printer for the first time. Other kids decided to still use the Extraordinaires Design Studio Pro game (<--- Amazon link) that they did last week. Others created with Legos. And some did coding/remote control driving with the Sphero. Overall, it was a ton of FUN and the kids loved it. 

Here's hoping the rest of October can live up to the first week!

We had quite a few things going on in the library this week. From MAP testing, to teacher trainings, to student checkouts and AR tests, we were usually pretty busy.

For our staff, we went over some of the preferences and settings within Gmail. Find some of our information here. Our tech integration guy and I encouraged our staff to begin using Gmail instead of the Mail application since our district has transitioned to Google.

In addition, we also got our book talk kit (AND BOOKS!) to get us ready for the Scholastic Book Fair. The books we got are pictured below:

I encouraged the Reading staff to come in and help themselves to read one (or MORE) before the book talks. I also highly recommended Refugee (it's the only one I've read myself so far) and then this happened:

Alan Gratz tweeted me. I almost fell over this morning when I saw it on my notifications. He knows me! :)

We were busy in the library this week! The 6th grade teams were in for orientation and we had an 8th grade group in to start their informative speech projects.

The 6th grade orientation was set up with three different stations. One group was in the library for a scavenger hunt. During the scavenger hunt, the students were introduced to the library set up (we use genrification) and also answered questions about various signs, displays, and other areas of interest. The scavenger hunt is below in case anyone would like to use it.​

A second station introduced the kids to Destiny Quest (our library catalog) and the library website. I created a very basic digital breakout game for this part of the day. The link to the game/website is here:
​https://sites.google.com/gpsne.org/destinybreakout/home. Their goal was to save Lulu the cat.

Finally, we had 8th graders in here starting research for their informative speech. Ms. Montamorano and I had discussed their parameters beforehand and they had previously selected topics. Once here, I went over our database collections and showed them the 5 Ws of Source Evaluation. We looked at a few different examples and they were on their way!