Buddy Reading- MS/ES

We celebrated Picture Book Month in the MS/HS Library by inviting our ES friends up to read with us.  Buddy reading is our most requested library activity (by both MS and ES students!)  Fun times were had by all.

Finding Bangladesh- Adnan M.S. Fakir

One of our Bangla teachers shared this TED Talk by Adnan Fakir with me titled Finding Bangladesh.  It's an interesting talk about how legends/lore from Bangladesh originated.  The first 2 minutes of the talk is the teaser from the movie that has been made: Finding Bangladesh 2: Tales of the South.
Learn something new about our host country!

Banned Books Week- it's here!

Middle School had many discussions this week about why books may be challenged.  Checkouts and holds of challenged materials soared, which always happens during Banned Books Week!

Our most requested hold this week...Thirteen Reasons Why.  Students were surprised to hear that the book is over 10 years old and the "movie factor" increased challenges of this book.

Find all the books below (and many more) in our libraries!

(ALA.org)

Digital Norms

The middle school has been focusing on creating Digital Norms for the first month of school.  The library is working in collaboration with our tech department with an "end-goal" to become a Common Sense School.

We kicked off this process during middle school orientation by asking all grade levels to complete a Padlet with ideas for how to be respectful online.  The three topic areas were:

• Respect Self
• Respect Others
• Respect Digital Property

Once we had their ideas, we combined them into short statements and asked each grade to use a Google Form to vote on what they felt their grade should focus on.

Next- we went "old-school" as the students commented and created actual posters (using no digital media whatsoever!) of digital norms that are important to them.  Our old-school posters will be displayed around the middle school.

Below is the idea we came up with for a collaborative poster that could be worked on by several classes with different library times and in only a few minutes as library lessons are short.

Grade 6's completed Digital Norms poster

Grade 8's work-in-progress poster

Genre Feature Table- an easy addition to library lessons

I am lucky enough to see Middle School Humanities and English classes once per 8-day cycle for a 30 minute library lesson and book checkout.  This year, we added a genre feature table to our classroom area with the the hope of increasing checkout and introducing students to new books.
At the start of each library lesson, I book talk 4-5 books from the table and we discuss the featured genre.  For me, it's a great way to focus students and kick off our lesson.
This small addition to library time has been so successful that I have to re-stock the table after almost every lesson.
The featured genre for this week is: Sci Fi.

Buddy Reading in the MS/HS Library

This week our middle school students are buddy reading with our elementary students.  This is one of our most requested library activities by students and teachers at all grade levels.  We enjoyed several great picture books and Grade 7 even read the tall tales they wrote to Grade 1 students. Over the 2 years we've been doing this, I've seen the read-aloud skills of our middle school students improve a great deal!

Book Speed Dating

Book Speed Dating has been a hit in the library this week.  Students had four "dates" with different books and then ranked their dates using an emoji rating system.  Many students left with 2-3 new books, which is great for our upcoming discovery week.  No devices allowed, but books are!

Credit to Jessica Drinks; I used her slides on SlideShare as a guide in creating this presentation.

Parent Tea: Social Media

Here's a funny video about parents and technology that we shared at our recent Parent Tea on social media use.

Need more informational resources on social media?  Try Common Sense Media for media reviews and parent/family guides!

Awkward Things Your Parents Do With Technology

Cricket, director. Awkward Things Your Parents Do With Technology. YouTube, Boldly, 19 Dec. 2014,
    www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTGkgrZdPfs.

International Dot Day

International Dot Day is celebrated on September 15th.  This day honors the picture book The Dot written by Peter H. Reynolds.  Dot Day encourages people of all ages to celebrate creativity, collaboration and courage.  In the MS/HS library, we observed International Dot Day by exploring the Quiver App, an augmented-reality coloring app, to make dot pictures come to life.  Here are some photos of Grade 6 students making their drawings appear to jump from the page.  

Download the app or stop by the library to try out the Quiver App on our iPads.

Print more Quiver coloring pages here: http://www.quivervision.com/coloring-packs/

Symbaloo

I recently discovered Symbaloo and have updated our library homepage in Destiny so students have easier access to our library resources.  Students like having all our frequently used links in one place as well as the icons.

I've included sections for:

• Databases
• Image searches
• Reading/Books
• Social Media
• Citing Sources

Do you have good resources you think I should add to our library Symbaloo?  If so, let me know!  Create your own Symbaloo here.

What to do with old library books?

Book Art!

In collaboration with our middle school art teacher (99.9% of the credit goes to him- I just donated the books) we have new art displays in our library!
When I arrived this year, I found our non-fiction section to be very outdated.  The massive book weed resulted in several big, thick books that were perfect for recycled book art.  The MS students worked very hard to create these masterpieces:

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

Book Spine Poetry

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

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."