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!

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.

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.)

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?)

What is the title of that book about that thing?

In library school, they tell you that the easiest kinds of reference questions are “known item” questions. This means the patron knows the exact book (or whatever it is) that they want and they just need your help finding it. As it turns out, today we did a known-item search that was pretty hard. In fact, Lisa and I were both working on it for the better part of half an hour. This was the basic request: “It’s a book about a kid and no one can tell if she’s a boy or a girl, so she gets thrown in a river or something. And it’s got a scary-looking cover.” Well we tried googling lots of different search terms, but we got nowhere. I finally found the book by going to the KCLS catalog and searching “gender identity.” Some thoughtful reader had tagged it as such. Let’s all take a minute and be thankful for social tagging.

By the way, the book was What Happened to Lani Garver.

Today I also did the 5th grade booktalks again. To see what I recommended, you can click here. Or, if you ever find yourself in the Bush School library, you can check out the display under the sign “Award Winners” and all the books are right there. Actually, a couple of them got checked out pretty fast, so they won’t be there. But I made a copy of the list and left it on the table if you want to write titles down and find the books at the public library.

Since I’ll be doing these booktalks regularly, I started to work on my next set of booktalks, too. I’m currently reading The City of Ember by Jeanne DePrau to see if it makes the list.

I entered the grades for the 3rd grade worksheets, too. And I put up more trivia questions on the bulletin board. It was a good day!

Cataloging and Observing

Today Jody brought in one of my all-time favorite picture books: Toot & Puddle. She bought it for the library’s collection over the weekend and suggested this would be the perfect opportunity for me to see how new books are cataloged and added to the system at Bush. And she was right. I mean, who knows? I could be running a library all by myself in the future without a library technician’s help and expertise.

Thankfully, the Bush library has a wonderful library technician in Lindi Wood:

She gave me the rundown of everything she does and I was amazed. She touches every book in the collection! She organizes the parent volunteers! She provides AV support for the entire staff! In my School Library Media Management class we’ve been talking about making ourselves integral to the school and Lindi definitely has that down.

The Bush library has such a generous budget that new books are added to the collection all the time. Lindi buys MARC records that are seamlessly entered into the Bush catalog, but she also tweaks the subject headings to enhance findability. This is one of the great things about small libraries–you have the opportunity to really tailor your services to your users. For example, during my time with Lindi, Lisa Keller stopped in to ask for Lindi’s help in finding a hip hop video. Lindi discovered the video was cataloged only as “hip-hop” with a hyphen, so you couldn’t find it if you didn’t use a hyphen in your search term. So Lindy added “hip hop” no hyphen entry right on the spot. This may seem like a small thing, but coming from a huge system (UW Libraries) I’ve seen it take weeks for a catalog record to be corrected when it had serious errors. So it’s refreshing to see how painless things can be in a smaller system.

After observing the cataloging process, I worked with Jody to plan our Wednesday classes. I’d spent some time at home looking over the 3rd graders worksheets and it seemed like they were actually getting it, so we’ll just spend a little more time on it on Wednesday and then start our Reader’s Theatre project. I’m going to read Toot & Puddle to the 2nd graders and we’ll do a postcard project after that to tie in with the story.

At 11:00 Lisa invited me to observe her doing book talks for the 9th grade classes. It was a great opportunity for me to see a pro in action, and especially helpful considering I’m doing the 5th grade book talks on Fridays. Lisa promoted 10 books, of which the 9th graders have to choose one to read for a novel project. I was surprised a the difficulty of some of these books–the 14-year-olds at Bush are very strong readers, but I’d still expect to see a few YA novels offered. This seems to be an issue we run into from time to time: Adult Literature (the canon, etc.) vs. young adult literature (books written specifically for teens). Bush is an academically rigorous school, but it seems like there should still be a place for YA lit in the 6th through 10th grade curricula.

In other news, we found out that Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. In true Pratchett style, he called the ordeal “an embuggerance.” You can read about it here.

Huck Finn and the Canon

I got to school early today to sit in on an interesting discussion. Lisa Keller visited Andy’s 10th grade English class to talk about why they read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and why they maybe shouldn’t. Mark Twain’s classic novel has been required reading in many high school English classes for decades, but it’s also controversial because of its use of racial slurs and its portrayal of Jim. Lots of important questions got asked, such as:

• Why is it important to read classic literature?
• What is it about some books that makes people want to ban them?
• Why is it important to read things that may make us uncomfortable?
• Who decides what we “should” and “should not” read in school?
• What if Young Adult novels were added to the English curriculum?

It was great to see Lisa advocate for YA literature. At the end of the class she offered to send the teacher a bibliography of great YA books. Maybe he’ll consider adding one (or two or three) to the curriculum? Time will tell. In the meantime, here are a couple YA books that would be worthy of being taught in IMHO:

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Touching Snow by M. Sindy Felin
• The Pigman by Paul Zindel

Today was also my day to teach 3rd grade classes how to use the catalog. It was much harder than I thought it would be, particularly because the kids seemed to have a bad case of the wiggles. Still, I got through it. I’ll look at their worksheets on Friday and go over things they didn’t get next Wednesday.Jody and I talked about Groundhog Day with the Kindergarteners and 2nd graders. I read aloud several different books about groundhogs (including a book from the Fluffy series that was a big hit). Because of the Kindergarten bake sale, we had quite a few interruptions, so it was a bit of a challenge to keep the kids focused on the stories.

I have noticed that I haven’t been asked many true reference questions since I’ve been working at Bush. The most common question I answer is how to find a particular book (which we call a “known item” question at the Engineering Library at UW). It’s usually a matter of looking the book up in the catalog and then locating it on the shelf. I make an effort to demonstrate to the younger kids what I’m doing so it will be more familiar to them when they learn it. And for the older kids, now that they’ve had their lesson I’ll be asking them to try to find the book themselves before I help.

The other kind of questions I get are readers’ advisory, which means suggesting something to read for fun (I never get to answer these kinds questions at the Engineering Library!). I tend to automatically suggest books I myself have enjoyed, but I’m trying to train myself not to jump right into “Oh I just love so-and-so” and instead ask more questions and think harder about what would be best to recommend. So far I’ve pushed:

• Encyclopedia Brown on a 3rd grade mystery-seeker
• Clarice Bean on a boy looking for a picture book about a girl
• The Stinky Cheese Man on a kid in search of fractured fairy tales.

Happily, a lot of the Batchelder Award winners I book talked have been checked out. Jenine and I filled the display table up again with more award winners today.

Visiting Grade Five

I got to Bush earlier than usual today so I could visit the Fifth Grade classes at 8:30 and tell them about those Batchelder books I’ve been reading. I was a little nervous, and I felt like I wasn’t really connecting with my audience. But afterwards I asked one of the teachers who observed me how she thought it went and she told me I did a great job. I still think I can improve, and I’m encouraged by the compliment. When I got back to the library I made a display of the Batchelder books so the kids will be able to find them if they want to check them out. We’ll see!

Now I’m working on my lesson for the Third Graders. I’ll point you to the documents I’m working on here and here.

It’s very quiet in the libray today.