Spring has blown right by me

We have TWELVE days of school left - yep 12 - where did this year go?? And where has spring gone?? Things have been so busy here since spring break that many times I have said - Oh I need to blog about that and then 3, 4 days later I just gave up finding the time to blog about it, so here are some high lights of what we've been up to here in the media center.

Poetry Month
I wrote about Poem in your pocket day, but we also had a great Poetry Cafe in the Media Center - due to state testing we had some scheduling glitches in getting a lot of classes to come in and share their poems, but the classes that did get in here had a great time sharing poems they wrote and some of their favorite poems by others - my favorite was the first grade class that shared the Kentucky fight song as their group poem (can you tell where their teacher went to school!).

Inventory
Not very exciting, but necessary. We were lucky that it did not take too long and in the end we were only missing about 6 items - not bad for a library with over 18,000 items!

Author visits
For Children's Book Week we celebrated by having two authors visit us.
Monday we had my friend Laurel Snyder - she was GREAT - I wish more of my teachers could have listened to her, she had some great tips for my kids in their writing and was very inspiring - and FUNNY!! The best compliment to a program that you run is when you have a parent come up to you and say "Johnny came home and couldn't stop talking about the author visit"
Tuesday we had Eric Litwin, author of Pete the Cat. He was SOO FUN! His program had guitars and harmonicas and storytelling and just a lot of FUN.

Both is these authors have some AWESOME stuff coming up and if you are local, you MUST get them booked for your school for next year - I really think both of these people are going to be BIG (as in, I knew them when kind of big...)

Summer Reading

I have started to talk to students about summer reading - I am doing a program that I have done for the past three years - basically I help the kids sign up for our local library's summer reading program and I also encourage them to participate in the Barnes & Noble program (and get a FREE BOOK) and in the Scholastic Summer Challenge website. I also ask them to send me a postcard to tell me what they are reading this summer. At the beginning of school in August I display the postcards on the bulletin board outside the media center. Last year I had a great response (even getting a postcard from Korea!) and hope that this years is even bigger.

I am also starting another blog - I have tried this before and things get so busy in the summer at home that I forget to post to it (gee, same things happens here too) but I really want this to work, so I am going to try and blog about different books and tie the books to some things and places I am going this summer. I am going to try and come up with a schedule 0 like every Monday I blog about picture book, every Wednesday I blog about a chapter book (grade 3-5) and then maybe a picture on Friday - I'm still trying to figure it all out, but I better figure it out quick, I only have 12 days left!!

Tomorrow is our 4th annual used book sale (here is a story from the first sale we held) - I am so excited, I have been sorting books all week and we have some great ones to sell - I am hoping we make about $500 to donate to Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.

And finally, the weekend is almost here and I get to see one of my FAVORITE people this weekend - yep, Jon Bon Jovi and I will be breathing the same air on Saturday night - I just wish my seats were closer, but oh well, it will be a great ending to a VERY hectic week here!