Blessed to Teach and Read

Wow.  I cannot believe that this year went by so quickly!  I also can't believe, though I shouldn't be surprised, that I haven't posted ANYTHING since October 2016!  Here's a quick, catch-up of relevant events with captions.  :) Third grade's CultureGrams projects turned out really well.  They worked feverishly, even when we were displaced into the multi-purpose room. They loved learning about a different country and its similarities and differences with their own.   Second grade finished learning about the different periods of the Dewey Decimal system, and shared some of their work for our library bulletin board. Fun bulletin board idea from Pinterest for the start of second semester Kindergarten through fourth graders then listened to me read aloud 20 different Georgia Picture Book Award Nominees, over many weeks, so that they would be able to vote for their one favorite book.  I worked in "28 Days:  Moments in Blac...

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...