A Bear in War by Stephanie Innes

Genre quiz for the Middle Years students

I found this great idea from Mrs. Readerpants blog!  Again, one of those crazy days of flying around the library world of blogs and I stumbled upon this little gem. I am going to try this with my MY students this fall. I think it's a fun way to get students looking at the different kinds of books they'd like to explore this year.

"What's Your Genre?" Quiz from mrsreaderpants

Thanks,Mrs. ReaderPants

The September "re-start"

Ok, so every year I promise that I am going to keep up to date with my library blog. This year I really want to do that as I have watched and followed so many great Teacher Librarian blogs this past year on Pinterest and received so many great ideas! It's my turn to share!
I also thought this would be a smart way to keep track of my lessons and share with our community the wonderful literacy and technology based learning activities that are going in our school library.

Having said that, we are now into our second week of school so I already have some catching up to do! 
We've started the school year with our early years students meeting 'Pete the Cat'. A fun loving fictional character created by James Dean with the stories written by Eric Litwin.  The students are having so much fun singing along with Pete and getting excited about library classes again!

I created a bulletin board for our storytime cove and wrote out the lyrics for sing-a-long. 

For our gr.4 students, I thought it would be a good idea to have them write letters to Pete (a bit more age appropriate) and tell him about how we have fun learning in our library ( a sneaky way to review the behaviour for our library!).

 

 

International Dot Day is September 15th!

In celebrating "International Dot Day", the early years students have been listening to the story, "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds during library class.  The book tells the story of a young girl, Vashti and how she doesn't think she can draw. Her teacher encourages her to leave her mark, so she makes a dot on a piece of paper. Her teacher asks her to sign it and proceeds to hang it in a frame in the classroom. Vashti realizes she can do better than a small dot and proceeds to let her creativity and imagination shine by producing an art gallery's worth of "dot" paintings.
Our gr.1-3 students have been leaving their own mark by designing their own dots for display!  Just a small reminder that even small mark can take you on a journey of creativity!
Celebrate International Dot Day on Wednesday by leaving your "dot' somewhere or with someone.

Another school year begins!

Once again, I have left this poor blog to flounder! I really want to make this a regular feature for students, staff and parents to find out about our themes and activities in the library. So here goes my third year in the library and I'm ready to make yet another valiant effort to keep this blog alive!

We are starting September looking at THE BOOK OF AWESOME, written by Neil Patrischa! I had a lot of fun this summer reading this book and putting sticky tabs on all my favorite "awesome" moments. Our students are now helping to create an AWESOME wall at the entrance of our school to celebrate all the awesome things about Linden Meadows. As always, the students surprise me with their creativity, thoughtfulness and "outside the box" ideas!

Our Bulletin Board inside the library showcases our new library theme "Back to Basic Training BOOK CAMP"! We will have some fun reviewing library skills and research stuff with a few drills (hahaha!).

Celebrating "I love to read" month!

Check out the highlights from February's Reading Rocks month:

READING ROCKS!!

February is a great month in the library and at our school as we celebrate "I love to read" month!! Our theme this year is READING ROCKS. With the help of a great committee and Mrs. Dueck's support this year, we have been having a blast looking at how we read music and how music is expressed through great literature. We had a "rocking" assembly on Feb.1st with our school's own rendition of "Gotta Keep Reading" inspired by the students at Occee Middle School who performed it on Youtube last year.

We had a full day of "Rocking and Reading" as we had a reading marathon through the grades as the students took turns reading for 15 minute intervals in the rocking chairs located just outside the library doors. We had those chairs moving from 9:00 until 3:30 with readers of all ages (even STAFF!!!).

On Friday, Feb. 11th, we continued with our Rock music theme and had our DROP EVERYTHING AND READ day with all the students and staff dressed as ROCK STARS!. We had everyone getting into the spirit from Hannah Montana look alikes, John Lennon, Justin Beiber and Avril Lavigne (OK, I tried!!!).

The following week was classical music themed as we played 10 minutes of classical compositions while the whole school silent read at the beginning of the day. What a peaceful way to start learning!

On top of all this fun, we've had students from our Leadership team preparing a snappy version of "Don't forget the Lyrics" every Thursday morning.

Thank you LM students for making "I love to read" month a rocking way to celebrate my favorite thing to do...READ!!!!

Stay Tuned for our wind up "Animoto" video with all the highlights from the past month!

Happy Reading :)