Grading Worksheets & Reading Aloud

The 3rd graders finished up their computer catalog worksheets today, so I spent some time looking over them. To my delight, a lot of them did really well. Now they seem excited to be able to use the catalog–so much so they were lining up to get a shot at the one computer that’s designated for catalog use. (Jody and I had to tell them they could log in and use the other computers, too). I may sound a little crazy saying this, but it both warms and chills my heart to see the little ones going to the catalog instead of casually wandering the shelves. Obviously, it’s good for them to have catalog searching skills, but it also means they’re growing out of their openness to serendipity and caprice. Sigh.

This afternoon I read Toot & Puddle to both 2nd grade classes. I also recommended all the other Holly Hobbie books Bush has and a book by her kids Jocelyn and Nathaniel. (Isn’t it interesting that her kids ended up writing picture books, too?) Theirs is called Priscilla and the Pink Planet. It’s very Dr. Seuss in its illustrations and the rhyming text. I liked it.

Because there was some interest in fractured fairy tales, I pulled John Scieszka’s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs and The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Jody also pulled Sleeping Bunny, Kate and the Beanstalk, and some others.  When we were out of fractured fairy tale options, I showed some girls the Tall Tales display I made for the fourth graders and they snatched some book off of that.

Popular right now @ Bush (from my perspective anyway):

• A to Z Mysteries
• Amelia’s Notebook
• Star Wars
• Football
• Ivy and Bean
• Fluffy

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.