Blessed to Teach and Read

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...

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 ...