What a week! Sept. 8-12

Wow! This week was crazy! This was my first week of having actual library classes. At my school, we have checkouts on Monday and Friday and then classes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Monday and Fridays are 20 minute classes of only check out. The teachers come with them and I have back to back classes all day. This allows me to have the entire 30 minutes to teach on the instructional days. I love this schedule!

This week was my library orientation lesson. We talk about procedures and rules for both checkout and instruction. With my 3rd - 6th grade classes, we talk about Bluebonnet books and Reading Counts. My 1st and 2nd grade classes get to watch a video I found on Youtube called Don't Let the Pigeon Touch the Books. They love it! For the rest of the school year, they will ask me where they can find that book. I will have to explain that it was just a video based on the book. With Kindergarten, we read The Shelf Elf and talk about how to treat books.When I brought out my stuffed Shelf Elf, they were amazed. I love the little ones! They really believed that Skoob would be watching them in the library. I felt that the lessons went really well.

Along with my library duties, I am also the administrator for our Scholastic Reading Counts program. This is a program were students read books, go on the computer and take tests and are awarded points. Students are awarded dog tags for point goals. They receive dog tags at 25, 50, 75, 100, 150, 200, 300 and so on. Each grade level has a point goal. If they reach this goal by a certain date, they are invited to a Reading Celebration in May. It's a big deal at my school. The only time this takes up much of my time is at the beginning of the year. That's why I don't start having classes until the 3rd week.  This year, I checked on Friday afternoon if all of the students were in the system. They were. So I sent an email for teachers to start populating their classes. Later, I went in to check on something and all of my students (700 or so) had been moved to inactive!  Now this may not seem like a big deal, but let me assure you, it is. What that means is I have to go into the list of inactive students (over 14,000 for the whole district) and find these students one by one and re-enroll them in our school. So in between classes this week, that is what I did.  The only students who had not become inactive were the students who were in a class. In the mean time, a parent of some former student brought some books to the library to donate. They were awesome! Barely used and some of the most popular series in the library (Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dragon Breath, etc.). So excited, but the must be made shelf ready. So in my spare time, that's what I will be doing.

In case you are interested, here is the prezi I showed this year for my library orientation.

Here is what my cart looked like at the end of Monday Checkout:

No worries, they were all back on the shelves before Friday checkouts came in!

 

Here's to having another great week and maybe getting everything done!