READ WHAT THE PRINCIPAL READS

Thank you to our principals for sharing their favorite books for our new display.

Here are their favorites:
MS Principal Favorites   Boy in the Striped Pajamas The Witch of Blackbird Pond The Giver All the Light we cannot see Blindness Still Alice Three Cups of Tea Agassi The girl with the dragon tattoo The girl who kicked the hornet's nest The girl who played with fire How Children Succeed Outliers	HS Principal Favorites  Glass Palace Perfume House of Spirits Chronicle of a Death Foretold Fifth Business All the Light We Cannot See Master and Margarita Catch-22 The Handmaid’s Tale

Board Game Day

Grade 7 Humanities students are beginning a unit on feudalism and their final project will be to create a board game.  To kick off this new unit, the library hosted students for a class period of board game playing.  Students played Life, Cranium, Monopoly and Ticket to Ride.  My favorite game is Life...though the amount of students declining to purchase auto insurance stressed me out! 😄

Monopoly	Life
Cranium	Ticket to Ride

How To Read Manga

Manga...... I love that students love Manga.  It is great for reluctant readers, graphic novel enthusiasts, and our general school population.   I moved the 741.5 collection to the front of our library because Manga and Graphic Novels check out the most.

But...I will admit that Manga is not my first choice for pleasure reading and I don't know how to read it.  So, when a student picked up a Manga book last week and said, "How do I read this?"  I was stumped.  "I have no idea," I said, "but I will find out for you."

I found my answer on MangaforKids.com.

Here's how to read a Double Page Spread:

 (MangaforKids, 2009)

For more information on how to read Manga, have a look at the "How to Read" tab on the Manga for Kids website.


Works Cited:
"HOW TO READ MANGA." Manga for Kids. UDON Entertainment Corp., 2009. Web. 05 Mar. 2017.

Book Spine Poetry

Check out some of the awesome book spine poetry created by our middle school Writer's Workshop students!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Stop by the library to pick up a book with an Irish Twist from our Saint Patrick's Day display. 

Not feeling the luck o' the Irish?  How about just a GREEN book?

"Heart of the Storm" by Michael Buckley

(Amazon.com)

I began reading the Undertow Trilogy by Michael Buckley when it was first released and was hooked.  I put myself on the wait list at my library back home for the final installment, Heart of the Storm, before it was even released.  Undertow is a dystopian trilogy about a teenager named Lyric Walker who observes the arrival of a race of sea creatures, the Alpha, on the beach near her home in Coney Island, NY.  Though the Alpha are initially considered the enemy and ostracized by society, it turns out there is something much worse in the water.  I loved this trilogy!  There is non-stop action, suspense, a bit of romance, and great parallels to be drawn between the storyline and current/past world events; an all around good read!

The entire Undertow Trilogy is coming to your library soon.  You can bet it will be on Mrs. Doyle's "Books I Loved" shelf!

Buddy Reading

Our middle school students had great fun reading to elementary buddies in our library!

The students were able to practice their read aloud skills, connect with younger students, and enjoyed practicing funny reading voices to make the elementary students laugh!  Elementary students enjoyed coming up to "the big kid library."

Backtrack to Valentine's Month

"Blind Date With A Book" happened during the month of February in our library.  Students were excited to unwrap a surprise read, though some were a bit nervous about not being able to see the cover of the book they were taking home.  Thank you Ms. Shuborna for the lovely book wrapping!

"Labyrinth Journeys: 50 States, 51 Stories" by Twylla Alexander

I am very excited to read this book when it comes to our library in the summer order!  Twylla is a long-time friend of mine.  We met teaching Grade 2 together in Cairo, Egypt.  Fun fact: Twylla and her husband drove my husband and I on our first official date to a faculty event. (He and I were both old enough to drive, but didn't do so in Cairo!) 😀

We were lucky enough to work with the Alexander family in Moscow, Russia and visited them in New York after they moved there.  I can't wait to read about Twylla's visits to labyrinths in all 50 states.

Check out Twylla's website here: Labyrinth Journeys

 (Image from Amazon.com)