Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2015

Another Year

I'm well into my second year as a media specialist!  These first two months have held many long-hour days, some tears, and plenty of hard work!  I've adjusted to the 35 minutes it takes me each week to type in all of my plans, AASL and Common Core ELA standards to our media center planner on ItsLearning.  I've changed out lots of ink cartridges, printed loads of posters for teachers, and set up some resource lists in the media catalog.  I've already accomplished some teacher trainings on using the media catalog and new resources that are available this year.  Like last year, I've helped one of our gifted teachers, Mrs. Wing, with the daily morning news production, and started our second year of Battle of the Books with the help of Miss Grimes and Mrs. Tate. The kids, all 1,000+ of them, and our teachers, are what make work worthwhile.  :)  I'm still in a fixed, all day teaching schedule, completing six to seven, back-to-back, 45-minute lessons a day.  That rig

2015 Summer Reads

Our county Media Specialist, Susan Grigsby , has asked us to post a "shelfie" of the books that we've read this summer.  I remembered that I could update my  Shelfari app, and since the books that I've finished to date all fit onto 3 shelves, I snapped a picture.  These same books are in the Shelfari to the right.  Just click through. ----> I was trying to start reading through this year's  Georgia Book Award Nominee Finalists for grades 4-8, but that was starting to get costly.  So, I looked at what books I could check out from my local Gwinnett County Public Library on my Overdrive app for iPad.   ALL of the books above are digital content downloads.   All of them .  Knowing that some of them would be returned as the days ticked down to the due date actually motivated me to finish reading some of them.   This naturally lead me to reflect on my Follett wish list for the upcoming school year.  Almost all the books in that list are hardcovers wit

Another Year in the Books

Wow!  Another year in the books!  It was wonderful not to have to pack up a classroom, now that I'm in the library!  Finished up the 19,000+ book inventory, re-labeled over 125 books that were coming up incorrectly barcoded, inventoried and reorganized the teacher resources closet (Actual space to add more materials!), and reorganized the reference shelves to, hopefully, make them more usable next year. I did already see several projects that will need my attention in the fall, such as relabeling our 39 Clues books as a "series" to make them easier to find.  Will also need to re-label some reference book spines, and to try to help categorize the teacher resources mentor texts into usable topics for mini-lessons.  While we did just adopt Lucy Calkins writing materials, and I'm sure we'll be looking at ordering her mentor text suggestions, we can also still utilize the many books we have previously purchased.  I also found some great math and science texts i

PBS Learning Media

Well, what do you know?  A Facebook ad finally led me to something great!   How had I not heard about PBS Learning Media yet?  It's fantastic!  Our county had allowed us to preview a different great resource over the winter break called Teachingbooks.net .  Lots of great lessons for a media specialist like me, but this PBS resource appears to have just as many great lessons - for FREE!  Plus, I simply adore public broadcasting and support our local system, GPB , with a financial donation each month.  And, it seems much more user-friendly with searches for media specialist standards and content standards.  Looking forward to incorporating their lessons into my lessons this semester!!!  Very excited!  Hope it works at school!!