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...

In the summertime, I usually follow this pattern:  stay up super late into the wee hours of the morning, sleep in until around 10 a.m., and then mill about all day.  As the days tick by, I then stop knowing what day or date it is and stop remembering the things that are told to me.  My husband and I go for a week to some beach, and I typically spend a week at home in Alabama with my family.  I do try out lots of new recipes from my Pinterest board, and I do catch up on reading all the books I want. I also stress out a bit about the impending school year, knowing that 40+ hour weeks lie ahead of me, yes, even as a librarian!  But typically, the highlight of my day is going to the mailbox to get the mail.  Three glorious minutes in the sunshine. However, this summer is completely unlike any of the ones before.  My husband, Michael Daniels , is currently out of a job due to a lay off.  He has been out of work since April.  We decided to put hi...

As always, I'm very far behind on posting, but I've finally combed through all of the photos and put them into Layout to share with you. Created a "Reading Helps Your Mind Bloom" book display, to leave up as state testing started.  I pulled lots of gardening, bees, and butterfly books. Plus, lots of potential parents came through at the end of the year for tours, so it was good to have this out to keep it from being too sterile as all the library books started coming back.     I did a "Hop Into a Great Book" display here to put an emphasis on some seldom-circulated books as well as to highlight nonfiction, though I also put out some fiction books too! Kept on teaching kindergarten and first graders about different authors.  I did create some very fun centers for Mo Willems.  As one paraprofessional said to me, "You're brave to do Play-Doh on carpet."  However, we didn't really have any issues when I gave the kids clear expec...