Media Update

There are some very exciting things happening around here. Mrs. Coats and I just started a 20 Time project with her 1st period. They have selected some great projects and goals to work on this semester. I am excited to see where they take these.

I have not written any book reviews in a while, so I thought I'd share a few books that I have read recently. I have read both The Distance Between Us and On the Fence by Kasie West and I really, really liked them. Along the same lines, I read My Life Next Door and enjoyed it as well. The girls LOVE them. I also read Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality by Elizabeth Eulberg and although I normally like books by her, I was not a huge fan of this one. I just finished Little Women and Me and I liked it. I thought the premise was neat and having read the original I enjoyed the new take on a classic. It did drag in a few spots and I can see how struggling readers would have difficulty. Next up is the 8th grade book club book, All Our Yesterdays.


Upcoming:
We will have the Bremen Academy Book Fair February 9-13, so please come by and check that out.

BMS Book Club will meet again Feb 20th. 6th and 7th grades are reading Michael Vey: Prisoner of Cell Block 25 and 8th grade is reading All Our Yesterdays.

New Genre Section

We are adding a new genre to the fiction section of the media center. Middle school literature and the middle school reader are rapidly changing. Books are always pushing the limits of what is considered acceptable, and while that can be a good thing, we still want to protect our "babies". The new section will be titled "Young Adult" and will feature books that are more suitable for older readers. These books will be available for all 8th graders. Other grades may check them out with a permission from a parent. Books in this section will include titles like The Fault in Our Stars, Panic, and If I Stay. All of these books are popular books. They all have a waiting list a mile long and many have been released as movies. There is value in these books, they are just not for everyone.

Christmas Shop

The Christmas Shop was a great success. We had tons of students and teachers selling great crafts and food. Thanks to all of our parent volunteers for helping calm the chaos!

Long Time, No See

So it appears that I have been slacking on my blog postings... Shocking, I know. Well I just got back from an amazing time at GaETC. I am fired up and ready to go with lots of new ideas. There were tons of great speakers and presenters. If you have never had the chance to go, you need to.
Since we have Chromebooks here, I tried to go to any session that was Google/Android related. I also saw several sessions by wonderful media specialists. I got to present at the GLA/GLMA Exemplary Media Programs session and accepted the award for 2013 Exemplary Media Program at the GLMA Luncheon on Friday.

End of the Year Wrap-Up

Wow! What a great year! We had tons of exciting things happening. This year we moved our fiction collection from ABC order by author to genre sections so that it would be more like browsing a bookstore, practiced research skills, made book commercials, hosted a book club, had 2 book fairs and a Christmas Shoppe, piloted Reader's Workshop, won the Georgia Exemplary Media Program Award, and did it all while averaging a checkout every three minutes! That's a lot of books.

Let's start with the genre shelving, because I know people are interested to see how that went. As you may know, we started with three sections to "test the waters": SciFi, Sports, and Mystery. After basically the first week of checkouts and all of the positive feedback from kids, we decided to go all in. We have the following fiction genre sections: Mystery, Sports, Action, Realistic, SciFi, Fantasy, Historical, Humor, Horror, and Animal. Thanks to the help of our wonderful in-house sub, Ms. Hardie, we got it all done in record time. If you want to see how we did it, check out this post. Overall, it was a huge success. While our circulation didn't increase by a huge percentage (it was already very high), I think the books that were checked out were read at a higher completion rate. In other words, I think the genres helped kids have more success picking a book they liked, so they were more apt to finish it. It also greatly reduced the number of times I got asked where the mystery, etc. books were. I got many positive comments from kids and parents who just love it. We also had an open house for 3rd grade and those kids and parents are excited about it. While I won't be changing the Dewey section of my library to subjects, I do love the fiction section like this.

The other topic I am really excited about is the success that we had with Reader's Workshop. The kids enjoyed it, the teacher I worked with loved it, and the principal loved it. All in all, with CRCT, field trips, and BMU, we had about 5 weeks with the kids. In that 5 weeks, the class average reading level rose almost half a grade level. Students who had not read a book all year finished 2. SUCCESS!!! Next year several teachers will be implementing it in various ways in their classrooms. I am super excited to work with them and make it a success for their students too.

As I finish up my last minute summer tasks and pack a box of books to take home to read over the summer, I am so thankful for such a great year. See you in August!

The Book Whisperer

I don't know if I ever mentioned it on this blog, but when I read The Book Whisperer several years ago I became obsessed. OBSESSED! Like I took it with me to the lake one weekend thinking I'd skim through it on the way down and that turned into reading it all the way down, reading it while Steven set up the camper (God bless him!), reading it on the boat on the way to dinner at the marina, and finishing it up on the way back that night with my trusty book light kind of obsessed. Yes, I'm a total nerd. I have a book light. I really wish I had read this years ago when I actually taught reading. As a media specialist couldn't really implement anything,  but I gave copies to several of the reading teachers and talked about the strategies, etc in reading department meetings. At one point, I even had my old principal agree to let me lead a book study for professional learning, but then other things came up that were required for our system, so those took precedence. I really felt like everyone thought it was a great idea, but didn't have enough time or were too scared to implement it in their classes. I felt like I was getting no where.

Fast forward to this year. I have a principal and a curriculum director (the old principal) who really want to see this model in action and see what it can do. SO EXCITED! I am piloting a Readers Workshop model based on ideas from The Book Whisperer, Reading in the Wild, The Reading Zone, and probably a few other places that I am forgetting. I will be working with a 7th grade teacher who took over mid year when the old teacher moved to Texas. We are starting with one class just to get our feet wet. Also, we are going to split the class into two flexible groups. Half will stay with her to work on mini lessons & CRCT review and the other half will come to me in the media center. Half way through the class period we will swap them. I realize I am very lucky to be able to run this model with 15 kids at a time. Trial and error and monitoring will be a whole lot easier than with a full class. However, once I get the kids trained as to what I expect and what is required of them, we will move back to the regular classroom and work as a whole group. Then I'll work with the teacher to take over running the model. I am hoping that we can really make this work and that the kids like it. One of my big concerns is that we only have one 9 weeks to get it right. However, the prinicpal has said if we can prove it works well in our school, then we can look at expanding into the other grade levels next year. I'd love to model it for other teachers and help them with the transition.

I have created several record keeping forms, but I'm going to hold of on sharing them until I have used them. I'm thinking I'll be doing plently of tweaking once I get started.

Wish me luck! We start on St. Patrick's Day!

Book Club 1/9

Our next book club meeting will be tomorrow. 6th and 7th graders read The Emerald Atlas and 8th grade read The Apothecary.
    

Book Club

Book club will be meeting next week to discuss our first book. We have been reading "Okay for Now" by Gary Schmidt and most of us have been loving it! In fact, many of the students have also read "The Wednesday Wars" as a result of liking "Okay for Now" so much. Our meeting will be held on Thursday during lunch times and we will be snacking on Zaxby's! Remember to bring your own drink!

Up next is "Small as an Elephant"...

Book Fair

The Book Fair is going well this week. It is technically the BMS Book Fair, but students in grades 5-8 are visiting with their classes.

New Genre Sections

It has been crazy in here the past several weeks with books moving to new areas of the media center every day. Since my last post, we have pulled Fantasy, Action & Adventure, Humor, Horror, and Historical Fiction. The two sections that surprised me were Fantasy and Historical Fiction. I knew we had a lot of Fantasy books, but I had no idea we had this many.

They take up an entire aisle- both sides of it! At least we can spread some out and put some on display. Historical Fiction was a genre that I would have assumed would be pretty small. We put them on one side of a short aisle because I thought for sure they would fit in 3 sections of the bookcases. They fit, but barely.

They are jammed in so tight it is hard to get a book out and there is absolutely no room for displaying anything. We'll have to move them again once we get everything finalized. I still have one more section to pull: Realistic Fiction. The dot labels for that section are on back order, so I haven't even been able to get started on it yet.  In theory, everything that is left is realistic fiction; however, I know I have missed some when pulling and sometimes the student helpers will shelve books without realizing that the book needs to be relabeled and put in one of the genre sections. There are also many that I left because I didn't know where they would go and I figured I would have more time to determine the genre later. It may be a while before the remaining books are sorted out...

Sports Books

The Sports section was a huge hit. We have about 300 Sports fiction books. Seven of these shelves were full on the first day. After two days of checkouts, this is what it looked like:

I think they liked it. What do you think?

Changes in the Library: Genrefication

When students come back in a few weeks, the media center will look a little different. I am starting a project to genre-fy the fiction collection. I had been reading about organizing the collection by subjects and getting rid of Dewey for several years, and that just didn't make since to me. It seemed like a lot of work to rearrange everything into a format that basically still looked pretty confusing from a kid's point of view. THEN... I read one blog, article, something- I really can't remember- that mentioned fiction. I heard ding, ding, ding in my head, angels sang, and light shone down from the heavens! That was where my media center could really benefit. Even though I don't particularly like book stores because if I am looking for a specific book I can never find it, it does make for great browsing; and let's face it, that's what middle school kids are doing.

After discussing it with the media committee, I opted to start small with three genres and expand this school year if the kids like it. I have a feeling they will! I decided to start with three of my most popular genres: sports, science fiction, and mystery. Other genres that I will add throughout the year are fantasy, realistic fiction, historical fiction, and adventure/action. I am on the fence about chick lit, humor, graphic novels, horror, and and animal section. As for now, though, the three sections are pulled to separate areas and then the rest of the fiction is where it normally resides. Things will have to shift as I pull more and more genres.

I'll share some pics then I get my signs up, but for now, here are the steps I took to get this project rolling:

1. Weed your collection- You might not think you need to do this, but remember, less books on the shelves means less books for you to sort through. Also, there is no sense spending a lot of time relabeling and updating the records on a book that is falling apart.
2. Generate lists and pull the books- I have Destiny, so this was easy. For example, with sports, I just searched sports fiction and printed that list. I also searched individual sports to make sure I didn't miss anything.
3. Label books- My books already have a ton of information
   
   on the spine. I have the most popular series labeled with the number in the series at the top and then I have the standard F and the first three letters of the authors last name and the AR level and points at the bottom of the spine. Some even have the lexile number under that. Additionally, books have the see through color labels over the AR info to make it a little easier for kids to find books on their level. For example, I can tell a kid to pick out a yellow book and I know that they will be getting one in the 3.0 to 3.9 range. I actually inherited this system from the media specialist before me; but it seems to work ok, so I stuck with it. Since there is already so much on the spines and I REALLY didn't want to relabel every fiction book, I chose to put a small colored dot at the top of the spine. Each color will represent a genre. It's not important that the students know what each color represents, this is simply for shelving. I chose to use these small colored dots from Brodart with the dot and protective strip all in one. They seem to stick pretty well, so I don't think I'll have much of a problem with them falling off. That was actually another reason for starting small. If these labels don't work, I'll switch to the plain dots and just use tape.
4. Change copy call number in catalog- This is where I was bound and determined not to spend a ton of time. Maybe I don't understand what other media specialists are doing here, but it seems to me that they are changing each book by hand one at a time. That would take forever and I honestly don't think I would have even considered taking on this project if I didn't have a way to change the call number of an entire batch of books at one time. As I said earlier, I have Destiny, so this was very easy to do. Well, once I figured it out, it was easy to do. Since I had all of my sports books pulled and labeled, it was a quick task to make a list of those books in Excel. Just open Excel and start scanning. After each barcode it will automatically bump down to the next cell. Once that list was complete, I saved it as a .csv file. In Destiny, under Catalog> Update Copies> Batch Update, you simply select "Change Call Number Prefix to", enter what you want the call number prefix to be, upload the .csv file, and click update. You could also scan the barcodes in here instead of making the list. I did this when I came across a few that I had missed or had been checked in after I pulled from the shelves. I opted to keep the F in my call number and to do that, I had to use a "-" since Destiny would not allow the call number prefix to have a space in it. This is actually what took me a little while to figure out. I had originally wanted the sports books to say "Sports F LUP", but to do that I would have had to re-enter each one by hand and that wasn't going to happen. Instead, I went with "Sports-F LUP". Another reason for this is if we don't like the set up, I can do a global update and change all copies with call number prefix of "Sports-F" back to "F". The call number prefixes for the other two sections are "SciFi-F" and "Mystery-F".
5. Clear a space for the new section- Next up was finding a spot to put these three genres. After pulling all of those books, I did have some gaps in my shelves, so I shifted the books that were left back, making space at the beginning of the fiction section for Sports. My shelves are so crammed full that I don't have room to display books, so that is one thing I want to remedy this year. I left plenty of room in the sports section to have at least one book displayed per shelf. To fit the other to genres, I had to get rid of some things at the front of the media center in the display section. The section where I featured different genres or themes each month had to be replaced with the Sci-Fi books and the magazine shelving had to be removed to hold the Mysteries. 

 Overall, the project has been pretty easy to manage. Of course, there are no students here! I am already itching to pull the next section of books because I know it will be hard when books are being checked in and out. The possibility of missing books will be much higher and with the heavy number of classes during the first semester, it will be extremely slow going. Oh well, that's the nature of the beast. I'll just keep pulling genres and shifting the unlabeled fiction back until there is nothing left! I'll post an update when I get the next genre pulled.

 

Summer Reading Newsletter

The news letter has been updated with links to Scholastic's Summer Reading Challenge Book Lists.

BMS AR Day

Since so few kids met the AR day goal of 350 points, I decided to do something very fun. We went to the mall and saw Iron Man 3 in 3D!!

They look real excited, don't they?

But, really, we had a great time. Several of them are hiding. You can only see 4, but there were 9 of us.

Hidden by Helen Frost (3.9/3.0)

I just finished my first of the 2013-2014 Georgia Children's Book Award Nominees. Hidden by Helen Frost was a very interesting book. It was told from the point of view of two girls. One of them tells her story in free verse poetry and the other is also written in a unique style. I didn't realize until the end when I read the author's notes that Darra's story was written that way to include another hidden story. In this book, Darra's father steals Wren's family's minivan and has no idea that Wren is hiding in the backseat. Wren is scared of what Darra's dad might do if he finds her, so she stays hidden in the garage for two days until she manages to seek out. Fast forward several years and the girls meet at a summer camp and eventually become friends.  I enjoyed this book and will be suggesting it to many of the girls. The nontraditional formatting always appeals to them, and I'll have to be sure to mention the hidden story!

Clone Board

I just found a great free app. It's called CloneBoard. We have been trying to figure out how to mirror the image of a tablet onto a PC that is hooked to the SmartBoard so that kids in math classes could work problems on the tablets and it show up on the screen and, therefore, the SmartBoard. We have also been trying to do it on the cheap. There are a million apps to control the computer from the tablet, but almost nothing to mirror it the other way around. Enter CloneBoard. When you open the app, it gives you a web address. If you go to that web address on your computer, you can watch what you are writing/drawing on the tablet.

There is a little lag time of course, but it seemed to work pretty well when I was testing it. Of course, using it in the classroom will be the true test. The 6th grade math teachers will be getting their tablets in the next week or so and we will get them set up, and then give it a real test. In case you are wondering, I have a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1, which is what the math teachers ordered as well (Thank goodness, because you really don't want to get me started on my refusal to use apple products when there is ANY alternative). I will warn you that the free version does have ads. I have only seen ads for things like YouTube, so nothing inappropriate. However, if it works well, we will probably "invest" the $0.99 to get the non-ad version.

Guess How Many Books Are in the Media Center Challenge

The Guess How Many Books Are in the Media Center Challenge has had great participation! Teachers have been bringing their classes in all week. They say it's so the kids can work on their estimating skills, but it's really so they can look around and make a better guess!

Teacher winner: Mrs. Dorch

Student winner: Lana Posey- only 7 books off the correct #

Speed Dating: Library Style

This week and next the kids are taking the CRCT, so by the afternoon, they are wiped out. They need something that is fun and doesn't take a lot of brain power. Enter Speed Dating. Well, not really...

If you have ever heard of a Book Tasting, it's basically the same thing. I thought that my middle schoolers would think going to a Book Tasting was cheesy, so I changed the name to Speed Dating. How it works is: kids get 2-3 minutes with a book to look it over and answer a few basic questions. When the timer goes off, they pass the book to the next person and get a new one. They spend 2-3 getting to know that book and so on until you run out of time. Since we are running a shortened class schedule this week, this activity was perfect for a thirty minute class. We had time for me to explain the process, to date about 8 books, and then for them to have time to checkout the ones they really wanted.

Here is what they used to record their results. Feel free to email me if you would like the the word document.

National Library Week

In honor of National Library Week I am hosting a "Guess How Many Books Are in the Media Center" challenge. The student and teacher who guess closest will each receive a Zaxby's gift card and a copy of The Grimm Legacy from the Georgia Children's Book Award Nominee list! Guesses are due by noon on Friday.

Also, I am so excited! I have posted before about the student created book trailers, but you will never believe what happened. Carl Deuker, author of Payback Time, actually watched the book trailer and thanked us for posting it!! How cool is that?! If you haven't checked them out yet, head over to the bmsmedia youtube channel and watch a few of them.

Newsletter

Just created my first newsletter using Smore. Wow! It was so easy to do. Big thanks to The Librarian in the Middle for sharing this.