Blessed to Teach and Read

As the school year started back, in-person, at the end of July, this was me a lot of the evenings when I got home: The stress was seemingly unreal and mostly from me expecting too much of myself with too little time to do it.  Since school had closed mid-March, I was not able to finish genre labeling the remaining books in the fiction section (F SNI - F ZZZ), which meant trying to do it all during preplanning.  It also meant moving 4,000 books into their new sections by myself.  I insanely, and very briefly, considered doing a full inventory of our books, since I was supposed to have done it at the end of the previous school year, but thankfully gave myself permission not to do it. 😄 Deep breaths. To accommodate some changes to the way our library would function this year, I made and shared a Bitmoji Virtual Help room with lots of different links for both virtual and face-to-face learners.  I also made a Google sign-up calendar so teachers could bring their entire c...

Another great year is in the books!  Am already looking ahead toward next year, gathering ideas for genrifying sections of our library, but am definitely taking some time to relax, restore, and spend time with family.   Here's a brief overview of happenings from March to May: Thanks to the VERY supportive parents of our school, we held our Spring Follett Book Fair.  (I helped decorate a bit.)  While the set-up was super easy and they give 30% cash, we've decided to go back to Scholastic Book Fairs, until they build more Follett distribution centers near us, and/or hire more staff.  We missed having a regional person on-site, to ensure that we were getting the books we needed.     I continued on with monthly Biblionasium Challenges, ending in the grand prize giveaway of 2 Paperwhite Kindles, donated by our local Zaxby's.   Loads of more lessons for my K-5 kiddos, with an emphasis on a variety different authors:...

November flew by quickly!  My New York and Alabama family were here to visit for the week-long, Thanksgiving break.  We made some fun memories together, and I cooked the biggest meal of my life! After they left, we promptly put up our Christmas tree. :D Before it snowballs into December, here's a catch-up of all that I've been up to at work this past month with my students: Kindergarten has been reviewing and learning about plot elements: Character (who or what the story is about), Setting (where and when the story takes place), and Plot (the events in the story).  Then I showed them the Early Reader shelves in the "E" for Everybody section, to encourage them to get a book that they will definitely be able to read to themselves. First grade has been practicing locating books in the "E" section by looking at the shelf labels and looking at the book spines.  It's a work-in-progress, and something we'll definitely be practicing again this yea...

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...

I'm doing it!  I'm posting before it's been 6 months! Haha!   I've been posting new books to our school's #SharonStrong as often as I can, to promote the new books we have purchased.   Through promoting our new books, author Ame Dyckman, saw one of my posts, contacted me, and sent our school enough "Misunderstood Shark" bookmarks and stickers, so that each child at school got both!  I posted her letters up next to our bulletin board.  The kids LOVED them, and continue to love reading her stories! And, before our county subscription to TeachingBooks.net ended, I entered a book contest and won this book for our school!  It's going into our Professional Library, since it's a paperback.   C.A.S.T.L.E. (Collaborative and Social Technology Learning Environment, also known as the library) Apprentices, or 5th grade helpers, have started working to create our monthly bulletin board and shelf display.  They're doing a...