Blessed to Teach and Read

Look at that shelf. Such disarray.  That's kind of how I felt around mid-August.  Pulled in too many directions.  On overload.  In need of a bookend to hold me up and set me straight.  (or, in need of more time in my day)  One week, I tried staying no later than 4 PM, and leaving undone what I couldn't accomplish, but that was stressful, too! I currently spend around 30 minutes everyday, either during classes, during planning, or after, afternoon car duty, to keep all of the books shelved.  I'm doing a better job of preventing the shelves from looking like the one pictured above.  (We've had 3 different moms come a collective six times to volunteer to help with shelving. Yay for Mrs. Stratton, who has come back multiple times!)  I implemented a new change this year, to allow 4th and 5th graders to re-shelve their own fiction or everybody/picture books.  That has helped! I also started a 5th grade program called "Castle Apprent...

This is how all of the student work from our Georgia Book Award Centers came out.  Again, some was digitally created, some was paper pencil, and some was crafted from their own imaginations.  Next year's goal:  Centers could be less teacher-directed, and more open-ended.              Reflection:  So, as you can see, I did put up all the hearts that students created for why they love the library.  Obviously, next year, I need to make better paper color choices, like yellow or light blue.  But, I also need to figure out what else I can do for that day or entire week.  Within my all-day, fixed, 6-day rotation, I did do lessons that involved Dr. Seuss' books, but for his actual birthday, it was back to regular library lessons.  I had read collaborative ideas from other media specialists within our county, and even created a page on our county's ItsLearning platform for sharing past ideas, but I didn't ...

Found out last night around 10 p.m. that school was cancelled for today.  One of those, "better safe, than sorry" situations, where we probably could have attended school, but stayed home and used our ItsLearning platform to learn instead.  I got time to work on a new book order list for this spring, and time to update my much-neglected blog.  (And time to catch up on some household chores!)  So, without much further ado, here's what I've been up to instructionally since my last post in September 2015... In October, I found this cute jack-o-lantern in the storage closet, and used it for our "Carve Out Time to Read" Halloween/Fall book display.   I also tried to incorporate spiders in kindergarten's lesson on "Verbs" and in first grade's lessons on taking notes from nonfiction books and identifying nonfiction book text features.  We also worked on our nonfiction writing in conjunction with our school's adoption of Lucy Cal...