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.

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