Children’s Literature Festival

Tuesday, March 11th

Today we took 12 students and 5 teachers to the Children’s Literature Festival in Warrensburg, MO.  This is the first time I have ever been to the festival even though I have heard about it since moving to Kansas City.  It was such an excellent experience that I am sad it was my first time, but I can say it will be the first of many!

Before I explain about the day, let me first say that I hope to bring more than 12 students next year!! It is one of those collaboration situations that I chose not to fight this year.  The teachers wanted the students to read 10 of the 20 Mark Twain books and prove they had read them by passing an AR test.  I disagreed with for many reasons.  Here are two: 1) 10 books seemed like a few too many and 2)AR tests aren’t always the best way to determine if a student read and understood a book. 

Next year I am planning on introducing discussion boards about the Mark Twain books through a free online discussion board system called Moodle.  Students will be able to log-on and discuss questions related to the book as they read it.   Myself and other teachers can also jump in and add our thoughts. 

Enough about next year…on to the fun day we just had!!

The first thing we did when we arrived was go down to the student union to pick up our pre-ordered books.  That place was very busy and I am so thankful we pre-ordered.   I pushed pre-orders really hard with the students, so that they could have their very own books to get signed by the authors.  We had all but 2 students order books.   For the two who didn’t order, I did not want them to be left out, so I had them get books from my own library signed.  I think they enjoyed this.

We were scheduled to see four authors.  Teri Sloat, Claudia Mills, Herm & MJ Auch and Cheryl Harness.  We actuallty saw five, because our first author session wasn’t scheduled until 10, so we snuck into a session at 9.    At 9 we sat and watched RW Alley, who is the illustratpr of one of the Show-Me nominees, Ziggy’s Blue Ribbon Day.   Mr. Alley did a great job of talking to students about what it is like to be an illustrator.  He talked about where he works and showed how he starts his drawings.  One of the most interesting things he talked about in my opinion was how difficult it is to draw the same character over and over and keep it looking the same.   I had never thought about this before, but it makes sense that it would be difficult.

The next author we saw was Teri Sloat.  She talked about her time living in Alaska.  She has written and illustrated books about stories people told her when she lived there.   She had pictures of Alaska that she showed us. 

After Ms. Sloat we were scheduled for lunch.  We took the students down to order food.  I need to work with some of the teachers in my school!!! There were about three choices of places to eat, a few teachers wanted them to all go to one place.  It was only 12 kids and we had 5 adults!! Couldn’t we split up???  Me oh my.   I took 25 inner city kindergarteners to the zoo for goodness sake with 2 parents.  Let’s let fourth graders pick their own lunch choice.  Okay stepping off my box.  So I made a decision that students could eat where they liked and everyone made it back to the table in one piece.

After lunch we saw Claudia Mills.  She was very humerous.  She told us stories about her own childhood and explained how those experiences show up in her books from time to time.  She was so soft spoken, yet not shy like I had expected. 

I think my favorite session was the one with Herm & MJ Auch.   MJ Auch wrote WingNut, one of the Mark Twain nominees for this year.  Several students had purchased a copy of this book and were able to get it signed.    What was even more interesting however, was learning about the books they make that have to do with chickens!!! It was fascinating.  What happens is that MJ makes the chickens out of clay and then Herm fancies them up using photoshop.    They showed us how the chicken in the book Souper Chicken was made from clay to photoshop.   I never would have guessed.  It was really neat. 

Our final author to see was Cheryl Harness.  We were only able to stay with her for a half hour.  She talked about how she went to teacher school but found out she did not want to be a teacher, so she became an author.   

When we left Ms. Harness, we had trouble finding the bus.  We had rode with another school in our district and we could not find any teachers or students from that school either.  It took us over a half hour to find the bus.  So it turns out that we could have stayed and finished with Ms. Harness.   Darn.

I was very impressed with the students behavior today.  They were polite and good listeners.  I was nervous that they might have a hard time sitting still for as long as they did, but they did a great job. 

Again, I’m sad that I didn’t go before now.  I have lived my whole life in St. Louis.  Some of the teachers shared that they remembered going to the literature festival as a child.  Oh how I would have loved that!!! I’m so happy my students and my own children will have an opprotunity to participate in a day like this.  I think St. Louis schools should take a long trip down, it would be sooooo worth it!

Can’t wait for next year!

Dr. Suess Bingo

We had our March open library evening last night.  I think it was a huge success.   We advertised the program about two weeks prior and had students sign up a week before.  In the PR stuff that went home we told parents about free green eggs and ham to eat and also fun playing Bingo together.

We had about 75 children and their parents attend last night, which was our biggest turn out of the year so far. 

When families arrived they were given a blank bingo boards and a list of Dr. Suess characters/books that we would be reading as “Bingo numbers”.     We encouraged parents to help their children make several Bingo cards together. 

While families we making their Bingo cards we were also serving green eggs and ham.  What we did was add small pieces of ham into an egg mixture and added green food coloring.  We scrambled all of that together and produced our meal.  We also served green sprite. 

After everyone made their Bingo cards and as they were finishing up eating, I read Green Eggs and Ham aloud.  I asked the students to help me.

Then we started playing Bingo.  The winners won books.   We had about 50 hard bound copies of Green Eggs and Ham and about 200 other paper back books from Scholastic.  These book give aways are thanks to Caring Communities/LINC.   The LINC rep that works in our buildling is so supportive of the library and reading.  She wants to help kids build their home libraries and will do anything to support that. 

So the winners did not just receive one book- no the winners recieved Green Eggs and Ham, plus 5 paperback books of their choice.   It was a very exciting evening.  Some children left with upwards of 10 books each.   Parents were engaged in activities with their children.  It was a very postive event.

Two days in the life

Wednesday, March 5th and Thursday, March 6th

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008:

8:30 a.m. Arrive at school.  Turn on computer. Check email.

8:45 a.m. Students arrive and start bringing permission slips for children’s lit festival tomorrow.  I begin to update the spreadsheet with permission slips and money brought in for books that students will be purchasing to get authors signatures. 

9:00 a.m.  Walk down to office in order to be able to announce names of students who earned the privelege to go on the field trip to Warrensburg after the pledge of alliegence.

9:01 a.m.  Get asked by the gifted teacher to go on field trip because she needs another adult.

9:02 a.m. Call para in the library to let her know I will be attending the field trip.

9:03 a.m. Call 2nd grade teacher to let her know I will not be at school for our scheduled research lesson and that my para will assist her.  2nd grade teacher is fine with that.

9:04 a.m. Gifted teacher sends student to the library to get my coat and purse because she wants me on the bus as soon as I finish making my announcement.

9:05 a.m. Make announcement.  Students all cheer.  About half of the gifted students will also attending next week.

Open Library

Well here we are- the official first day of the semester. 

 In my library my schedule is basically semi-flex.  I’m due at school at 8:30 a.m. and usually arrive around 8:15.  My first scheduled class is fourth grade at 12:25.  Then I have third grade at 1:25, first grade at 2:00, kindergarten at 2:30 and second grade at 3:00 and the every other week I have bus duty from 3:55 until all the busses are gone.  We can leave school at 4:20. 

This schedule leaves my mornings open for collaboration, extra library time, projects, ordering, etc.

Today when I arrived at school, I worked on re-shelving the 900 section of non-fiction.  It was a mess and I wanted to relabel it before I started teaching my dewey lesson this afternoon.

At 11:00 I met with a fourth grade teacher about the children’s literature festival in Warrensburg.  This is all new to me, but they have gone for several years.  Students must earn the field trip by reading ten Mark Twain books and passing the AR test for each book with at least a 70%.  So far we only have about 7 kids going.  I’m of the opinion that this might be a steep reading goal for fourth graders.  I’ve voiced that and not had much of a response.  In effort to build relationships with the teachers I’m not going to push it this year-maybe next. 

After meeting with the teacher and determining which authors we’d like to request and what date we’d like to go, I filled out the form and will turn it in to the Caring Communities lady at my school.  She has offered to pay for the field trip! Yea!

 For my fourth and third grade classes I had a lesson about Dewey Decimal system planned.  We spent first semester learning how to search the catalog well and write down the important location information.  Now we are going to become experts at finding our own books.  We will continue to learn more about the Dewey Decimal system for the next several weeks.  Here is a funny quote from a fourth grade student today.  He raised his hand and said, “Since you are a professional, isn’t it your job to find our books for us?”  I responded, “Actually I am a professional and it is my job to teach you how to find books so you can be an independent learner.”  He then said, “You are a teacher?”   Oh my. 

 With my kindergarten and first graders we are studying Tomie DePoala.  Last week we read Strega Nona.  This week we are looking at an autobiography and a biography about Tomie.  The students were tickeled to learn that Tomie has three kitchens in his house and that he hated P.E. class as a kid. I think that introducing the biography in the second week of our author study was fun.  Last week I hooked them with the magic pasta pot, now I’m more officially introducing them to Mr. DePoala and in the next few weeks, we will contiue to have fun with his other books. I love that he has both fiction and non-fiction!  Good opprotunity to show them the different locations of the books and the spine labels of the books.

 Today with my second graders we started reading the Show-Me books so we can vote on them in March.  Today we read the “Great Fuzz Frenzy”.  My clerk actually read it because I had to run to the nurses office with a very sore finger.  So I’ll read it tomorrow and have something to write about!

No bus duty this week…but tonight was the monthly open library.   We did Bingo for Books tonight.  We had about 20 people including parents and children.  Caring Communities purchased paperback books from Scholastic.  Students who won Bingo were able to get books.  I made up rules as the night went on-the first Bingo of a game got two books, etc .  Some of the kids wanted to call Bingo numbers so that was fun.   Also part of open library is the opprotunity for students to check out as many library books as they want.  This allows them to take more than their typical two a day. 

 Well that’s about it for a busy Monday!

Inventory- Jan 3 & 4

I borrowed M’s scanner and my assistant S and I did inventory on January 3rd and 4th.  We were running into a situation where the students would be using the OPAC to find a book, they would write the info down, try to find the book and it wasn’t there.  This happened over and over again.  In early December, I emailed my prinicipal and asked permission to do an inventory on the first two days back from break.  An inventory hadn’t been done in nearly two years and it was time!  We closed the library these two days and went to work.  I stayed until about 6:00 p.m. Friday night finishing it, because I was determined to get back to normal on Monday the 7th. 

The first report I ran indicated that we had 321 missing books!! Woah.  That is almost one per student in our school.  Well, I just happened to miss all of the big books, of which we have about 100 of, so that brought the count down to closer to 200.  

Professional Development-Jan 2nd

We returned to the district from Christmas break on Wednesday, January 2nd. 

Wednesday was a professional development day for all teachers. The morning was spent in cohorts.  We picked these groups back at the beginning of the school year.  I am quite pleased with my cohort which is technology.  All the cohorts got books to read and discuss…all the groups except ours…we got 1 gig thumb drives!!! The first meeting we learned how to use the Classroom Performance System (CPS).   Our homework for Wednesday’s meeting was to design a quiz.  When we arrived Wednesday the first item on the agenda was to “show-off” our tests.  The quiz I designed was on book care and I used it with my kindergarten and first graders before they started checking out books. 

The next part of Wednesday’s agenda was to learn how to take a CD from the math series and download a quiz from those into CPS.  I did not have a CD to practice with, as I am not a classroom teacher, but I hope that payed attention enough to be able to help my teachers with it if they should ask.  

The last part of the agenda was to learn the ins and outs of Smart Notebook software.   This software is used with Smartboards. The idea explained was we are now to create a lesson using Smart Notebook that ties into the quiz we made previous.  This will allow us to use backwards design-we created the assessment first and now will create the lesson from that.  Since I already taught my lesson, I asked if I could have permission to create a new lesson and they are fine with that.  I will be creating a lesson on the Dewey Decimal system for third and fourth graders. We will be showing of these lessons at our next cohort session in April.

During the second part of the day, the elementary school librarians (four of us) met at one of the other libraries. 

 We discussed a variety of topics.  We had a discussion about leveling books in the library.  Another librarian, M, had gone to see a librarian in another district who had leveled all of her books.  M has a teacher that would like this done.   We talked about how much work it would be and we also talked about how Destiny (our catalog system) has many features that would allow us to level books and create lists of all the books at certain levels for teachers.   I’m not sure I’d want to physically level all the books in the library, for a variety of reasons, one being I feel that censors the books a bit and two being that I would not want to discourage older students who might need to read a book, but not want to check it out for feat that classmates will see it as a “baby book”. 

We also discussed the new library that will be opening with the new elementary school in our district next year.   We don’t know very much about it yet, but I suspect that the new library will come up throughout this practicum experience.  My own library assistant is applying for it herself.