Hooray

I officially passed the class that was my Bush Library DFW, so I’ve relaxed a little from blogging everything I do. I would like to mention that I went to Jenine’s Teen Tech Week event on Wednesday and found out I’m not a Dance Dance Revolution star. That was major. Also, my last book talks are on Historical Fiction. Here is the list of what I talked and here are some pictures of the display I just made:

Today in Readers’ Advisory:

• Horse books on tape (We had Marguerite Henry’s)
• The Hundred Dresses
• More American Girls! Samantha!

Happy Women’s History Month

Here’s a little display I made for the occasion:

Non-fiction picture books and MacBooks

Here’s my final book talking list. It went really well. I think I’m starting to get the hang of what the fifth graders are looking for and what they’re like. (Tragic, really, that I’m almost done with my DFW, but that’s how stuff like this goes…)

After I did my book talks all the fifth graders came down to check out books. All my book-talked books got snatched up. In fact, the kids ran through the library to get to them, which is not safe or right, but still made me a little proud. I’d only talked about 12 books and there are over 30 fifth graders, so I had a lot of kids to help with readers’ advisory. Mostly they wanted books about certain animals (chameleons, cows, horses, etc.). I had book talked Teammates, which got checked out fast, but there was more demand for baseball books so I suggested Heroes of the Negro Leagues, Baseball in the Barrios, A Picture Book of Jackie Robinson, The Story of Baseball, and Who Invented the Game?.

After the fifth graders left, I helped a tenth grader tackle a technology problem. He had created a Power Point presentation on his MacBook, but in order to project the presentation he had to send it to a PC with the proper hook-ups for the projector. The trouble was, the pictures in the presentation didn’t show up on the PC version because they were TIFF files. So I looked up the problem on Google and saw it was a common one. The help page I found said to go back to the Mac and re-insert the pictures as JPEGs. So I got him going on that he fixed it in about a half an hour. As he left Lisa said, “Who are the coolest people in the school?” and he said, “Librarians.” Darn skippy.

Today Lindi and Lisa were working on a list of dystopian literature for sixth graders. They already had a pretty good list with some of my favorites on it: The Giver and City of Ember. I could only think of one more to add, but it was a good one: Feed by M.T. Anderson.

Anecdote: A couple fifth grade girls came in today to complain about the factual accuracy of a horse book. I think it’ll probably get weeded now. Such is the beauty of empowered youth.

Call Numbers and St. Patrick

Today I talk about the meaning of St. Patrick’s day and read a few Leprechaun-themed storybooks to the Kindergarteners and second graders. I even did parts of the stories in my best Irish brogue, which was little embarrassing, but I’m technically trained to do it (I was in The Cripple of Inishmaan in college and we had a dialect coach). A lot of the books I put up on the March display got checked out, so I found more to put out. I think I’ve touched every single book in the collection related to Ireland, like even books that have nothing to do with Ireland but were just written by Irish people like Roddy Doyle or W.B. Yeats. Here’s a picture of the display (which, I didn’t create, but just filled in with books):

For third grade, I carried out my “Call Numbers Practice Session.” For what I think are obvious reasons, my second class went way better than the first one. The first time you try a new lesson plan is always hard. Each time you do a particular lesson you get exponentially better (until you get bored with it, that is). The first class seemed to think it was too easy for them, but they had plenty of difficulty locating call numbers quickly. I checked all the kids’ notebooks to make sure each of them had answered my basic question (“If you wrote a picture book, what would the call number be?”) correctly. For a few of them I had to track them down during check-out time and point out their mistakes (e.g. one child inexplicably picked random letters for his call number). I took some pictures of the journals, too:

Anecdote: One of the Kindergarten kids asked me, “When is it white-skinned people’s month?” I told her March is actually Women’s History Month and she got so excited. She ran over and threw her arms around her friend and started jumping and chanting “girls’ history, girls’ history, girls’ history.”

Wednesday in Readers’ Advisory:

• Knights (Young Arthur, Young Lancelot)
• Even MORE St. Patrick’s Day stuff (Ireland forever)
• Rapunzel (ran out of picture books, so offered last girl the movie)
• Mexican hairless dogs (one entry in a big dog reference book)
• Star Wars (always)
• Wakko’s America (not a single Animaniacs item is owned by Bush, though)
• Princesses (Paper Bag Princess!)
• Piano (instructional specifically, but we didn’t have anything of that nature)

In between classes today I worked on compiling books for my fifth grade book talks tomorrow. Marcia requested I talk non-fiction picture books. Here is the list I’m working on.

Third Grade Readers’ Theatre Recordings

Liz’s class:

Or go to: http://staff.washington.edu/destinee/miller_liz.mp3 

Mary Beth’s class:

Or go to:  http://staff.washington.edu/destinee/miller_mb.mp3

Erin Go Bragh

I’ve been working on an assignment for my School Library Management class of late, and today I asked Jody and Lisa for some feedback in regards to the direction I’ve been headed in with it. My assignment is to create an action plan for the Bush School library to somehow make it better. Some of my classmates working in different school libraries have their work cut out for them, but the Bush library happens to be in a very enviable position. So how can I make a great library better? Well, part of my assignment is to incorporate the new AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner, which the Bush library doesn’t currently use. So that was one new thing to include in my plan. But what else could I do? As of now, I’m recommending that the library create more learning artifacts as evidence of what they teach and that they publicize their value to the school more aggressively (using the ALA “@ your library” promotional tools). But I’m still working on it…

Getting back to my DFW duties, today I helped fill in the St. Patrick’s Day display (a picture is forthcoming).  I also helped Jody collect books for the Kindergarteners on gardening and collect more St. Patrick’s Day picturebooks. Then Jody and I talked about my lesson plan for the third graders on Wednesday. I’m working on a lesson plan that reinforces my previous lesson (on how to use the catalog) and also gets the kids thinking about their inquiry process. I’m going to have them sing “Plan, Do, & Review” (a Mike Eisenberg hit) and then write about their experience in their journals.

Today at the desk I helped two girls with known-item reference questions. They were fifth graders, so I expected them to be able to use the catalog, which they could. But I was a little disappointed when they seemed lost as to where to find the book on the shelves. So I guess it certainly won’t  hurt the third graders to get in more practice.

There were some major technology problems today (and one or two non-major problems). I accompanied Lisa on  a trip to help a teacher whose projector wasn’t projecting so I could get a taste of what it’s like to be the school-wide go-to person when gadgets misbehave. It turned out to be an easy fix, but there were bigger problems waiting in the library when we returned. No one was able to log on to the computers! For this size of a problem, Lisa calls in the technicians-by-trade (as opposed to the librarians-by-trade/technicians-by-default). They came and fixed it, but we were out of touch for a while. We had to write down check-outs by hand! The madness!

There is such a thing as a free lunch

My poetry books talks for the fifth graders went well today. The best part wasn’t the book talks themselves, though, (which you can see here), but the part where they followed me to the library and tore up the poetry section (don’t worry, I’m using “tore up” figuratively). Some readers’ advisory highlights:

• Poetry about horses
• Shakespeare’s sonnets
• More poems for two voices
• An “easy short” poem
• Robert Frost

Most of the books I talked got check out, too. Here’s a pic of my display:

After the fifth graders were taken care of, I went to work on getting the third grade readers’ theatre onto my blog. It’s a long story because I had to keep changing file types in order to edit the audio with Audacity (which is, incidentally, surprisingly easy to use), and then I realized I couldn’t upload audio onto a WordPress blog and that I’d have to host it on my UW space, but I didn’t want to download SFTP onto the Bush School computers, so I just emailed myself the files and I’ll have to put the plays up when I’m on campus next. Whew.

And let me now take time to acknowledge how wonderful Bush School parents are. They host an amazing lunch for the faculty and staff two or three times a year and today was one of those days. I got to go enjoy it with Lisa. I even got to take home a plant! (I asked which would be the hardest to kill and they pointed me towards the primroses.)

One last thing: there was a small book shelving crisis at the library yesterday (there were so many books to be shelved they started stacking up on the ground around the carts) so I went ahead and reshelved all the books from the displays that were taken down today (my award winners and the red books for V-Day). At the iSchool they tell you that when you’re doing a DFW you’re not there as an intern everyone can dump unpleasant tasks on, you’re there to learn important skills. This sometimes gets translated as, “You’re not there to shelve books.” But sometimes everyone’s got to pitch in and shelve some books. That’s just how it is. (And, you know, it’s pretty good exercise–lots of deep knee-bends.)

Lorraine Visits

Today my DFW adviser, Lorraine Bruce, visited Bush to check on me. We talked about Facebook and how great the Bush School library is. She only stayed briefly, but it was a nice visit.

We recorded the 3rd grade Readers’ Theater and it went so well. I’m going to fix a few things with Audacity on Friday and then I’ll try to post them here.

Today in Readers’ Advisory:

• Horse Books in series:Thoroughbred
• Black History Books: Henry’s Freedom Box, Jalani and the Lock
• Ballet Books: Graphic Novel (winner of Siebel), Tallchief biography, PNW Ballet book
• Rock Music: Crosby Stills and Nash CD
• Funny Dog Books (read-alike for Chowder, What Pete Ate A-Z)
• Mom volunteer wanted a book to read to her 3- , 4- , and 5-year-old crowd: Charlotte’s Web. Many Moons (If You Decide to Go to the Moon read-alike).
• Hockey Books
• Lego Books (Bush only has one and it was checked out)
• Trickster Tales (Tops and Bottoms)

One small highlight from my day: We had some time with the kindergarteners before they had to go to P.E. today, so I played Simon Says with them. It is really fun to be Simon. Also, tomorrow is their 100th day of Kindergarten. Congats, kiddos.

Prepping

I spent most of Monday preparing for things I’m doing later in the week:

3rd Grade Readers’ Theatre

We’ll be using new digital audio recorders to capture the performances on Wednesday, so Jody and I practiced using them. I read (most of) the instruction manual and we recorded ourselves and successfully uploaded the Windows Media file onto a computer. From there I hope to put it up on my blog. Jody and I had a discussion about the copyright issues inherent in sharing performances of plays. We agreed that posting the play on my blog would most likely constitute Fair Use, but Jody is still considering contacting the author of the play for her permission. An alternative to this (for future reference) would be taking the time to write my own version of the play; because it’s an Aesop’s Fable, it’s in the public domain.

5th Grade Poetry Book Talks 

I’d already gathered a stack of books for this, but when I looked at it on Monday I thought it was imbalanced (too much funny stuff and not enough serious stuff) and too much (if I talk more than 15 books it will take too long). So I took some books out and put some new books in. I also made a sign for the display I’ll put up on Friday and typed up my list.

Friday the 15th (with pictures!)

Two Fridays ago there was no Lower School, which I didn’t find out about until two Wednesdays ago, so I’d already prepared my book talks. Though I didn’t get to use them, I had fun getting them ready and eventually put them on display. Here’s a picture of the display:

(It looked better before it was ravaged, but it’s good that it was ravaged!)

And here is a list of the books I was going to talk.

Midwinter Break was last week, so there were no book talks last Friday either. But next Friday (2/29) I’ll be talking poetry books. I spent part of two Fridays ago (2/15) putting those books together:

Jenine and I did some weeding two Fridays ago, too. Pretty major weeding. We took out anything that hadn’t been checked out in the last three years, anything that was in poor condition, and anything with an unattractive cover. Some things were put in a discard pile, other things we kept with the intention of book talking them and seeing if they’d circ, and others we put in a “buy a new copy” pile (which was further divided into “buy a mass paperback” pile and “buy a trade paperback” pile). It was my first time really weeding, so I got to discover if I’m a sentimental type. I don’t think I am, though I did sigh with relief when I saw that Anne of Green Gables still circs every year.

Here are pics of the YA/FIC area we weeded:

At Bush, each of the librarians needs to check off on piles of books to be weeded out of the collection. That would horrify my Collection Development professor, I’m sure, but it seems to work here, with only a few minor disagreements. Weeding can get emotional, you know. (What? You didn’t know that?)