Blessed to Teach and Read

Guess what?!? When eating at Your Pie in Suwanee, I saw an advertisement in the side of the napkin dispenser. It got me to thinking, 'Do our school napkin dispensers have this feature?  How could I leverage that into getting my students to read even more?'  It turns out that our Cafeteria Manager, Mrs. Mathis, is cool with me having students share their book reviews in the sides of our cafeteria napkin dispensers!  So, I pulled typed, book reviews that students had already submitted on Biblionasium, and formatted them to fit.  I added a picture of the book cover with the students' name, teacher, and grade.  I emailed their teachers to send them down for a photo to share on our school's Twitter feed, #SharonStrong.  Fingers crossed more students take the time to write an engaging book review to share with the school!   I set up a Biblionasium challenge for Newberry books where students have to read and log 10 of 25 Newberry winning book...

Made it successfully through the first full week of my third year as an instructional media specialist, kicking off the 15th year of my teaching career!  Started a bit early by attending a Code.org workshop with these lovely ladies before summer's end.  Learned about the importance of teaching computer science in our schools, and began pondering how to incorporate it into my already-packed library and literacy skills lessons for the year. During pre-planning, received a package at school containing this advanced reading copy of Grace Lin's soon-to-be-published book When the Sea Turned to Silver .  (Thanks to Mrs. Weng, a former parent and friend of Mrs. Lin for connecting me with this opportunity!)  I'm not gonna lie.  I've been reading it as slowly as possible.  I don't want it to end!  I LOVE her stories and the way she writes stories within her story.    Her books are GREAT for teaching figurative language, too!  So beautifully wr...