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!

Poem in Your Pocket Day

Poem in Your Pocket day was last Thursday and I celebrated it with some pretty AWESOME folks from around the country via Skype!

First up, one of my first grade classes Skyped with a kindergarten class at Van Meter school in Van Meter, IA where the FABULOUS Shannon Miller is the media specialist. My kids shared their poems and her kindergartners shared a poem all together that they had learned.

Next up, one of my fifth grade classes Skyped with a group of students and teachers and even the Principal at Brook Forest school in Oakbrook, IL where Mr. Schu is the media specialist (and also the coordinator of this FABULOUS day). My students shared their poems and Mr. Schu had students and teachers share poems with us. Our favorite was when his principal shared a poem about picking your nose with us!!

My fourth grade gifted students (who have Skyped with me before) got to share poems with 4th grade students at Kickapoo School in Kickapoo, WI. Mrs. Malphy, the media specialist, even shared a great poem about rocks making good pets!

My last Skype of the day was with Mr. Gagnon's 4th graders in NH and one of my kindergarten classes. Of course I couldn't help but start off our Skype visit with a little Red Sox talk, but wouldn't you know it, one of his students, sitting front and center was a Yankee fan! The 4th graders shared their poetry with us and I had two of my kindergarten students share poems that they had written THEMSELVES.

It was an awesome day and one totally worth all the hoops I have jumped through this year in order to be able to use this resource. In my county, Skype is not readily available to all teachers and I went through MANY hoops and begging and pleading to be able to use it. Hopefully projects like this will show the people in my county what a great resource Skype (and/or some kind of video conference software) can be.

Check out my video with some pictures of the day and read about the celebration at Mr. Schu & Mrs. Miller's blog and at Mrs. Malphy's smilebox presentation.

Connecting with Skype

Yesterday I finished up my first school to school collaboration project (Flat Stanley Project) with a Skype visit between Mrs. Archibald's first grade class and Mrs. Dittman's first graders from Kickapoo Area School in WI.

After a few technical glitches, the Skype visit went off without a hitch! My kids loved to hear from the Kickapoo students about the pool at their school and their students were interested in finding out more about the skeleton that resides in our science lab. The teachers and students in Wisconsin all had a good laugh when I told them it had been a little chilly here this week - it has been in the high 50's here!

This whole project has been an AWESOME collaboration between the four of us (me, my first grade teacher Mrs. Archibald, Jen Malphy, the librarian at Kickapoo school district and her first grade teacher Mrs. Dittman.) We were able to pull in all kinds of learning, from writing to geography and even science when we talked about the weather here and the weather in Wisconsin. I can't wait to do more school to school collaborations!

Some pictures of our Skype visit yesterday

WILD Storytime

This week I used the excuse of wanting my students to use the website Build Your Wild Self (a website from the NY Zoos and Aquarium) to read one of my all time favorite books to them - Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. I think I love this book because I have so many memories of my parents reading me this book when I was a child and because I LOVE reading it out loud - I have great voices for the lines "And they Gnashed Their Terrible Teeth and they rolled their terrible eyes and they showed their terrible claws" Since this classic is also fairly short, I also read Wild About Books by Judy Sierra and illustrated by Marc Brown - I love it when I have a students make the connection of Marc Brown being the author/illustrator of the Arthur books!

The best part of this story time though, is having my students use the website Build Your Wild Self. The kids are LOVING this - basically you can choose all kinds of different animal parts to add to your boy or girl avatar. When the kids are finished, they can print out their wild thing, which comes with an explanation of what animal parts they added to their wild thing. I have encouraged the teachers to then take these back to their classroom to use with their kids in their writing workshops. Some of my kindergarten students are printing these out and taking them to art where the art teacher is working on having the kids make wild things out of different materials.

Another WILD thing that happened last week - I was named Media Specialist of the Year for Gwinnett County (the LARGE county I work in). I was totally surprised when my Principal, a few people from our district media office and my husband came charging into the media center on Wednesday yelling CONGRATULATIONS! What a great honor!

My Principal congratulating me after the ambush.

Flat Stanley Connections

A few weeks ago someone on Twitter mentioned doing a Flat Stanley project with their own kids - one of the teachers I used to teach with at another school used to do a Flat Stanley project every year and the kids loved it. I started thinking about how I could use some web 2.0 tools to do a Flat Stanley project with a twist. I was thinking out loud on twitter (I do that a lot) and another media specialist that I follow, Jennifer (@Jmalphy on twitter) from Wisconsin responded to me that she would love to do something. So a few emails later we had a plan - we would each choose a first grade class to work with. We would read some Flat Stanley books with them and have the students color their own Flat Stanley. We both scanned in our students Stanley's and put them up on a Picasa web album so that we could each access the Flat Stanley's to print them out and not have our tech. people screaming at us for emailing HUGE files to each other.

Before I gave my students the Flat Stanley's from our friends in Wisconsin, I showed them on a Google map WHERE Wisconsin is, how far away from Georgia it is and what the difference in our weather is (I think the day I showed them the high in WI was 40 and our high was 65!). Once I gave them to the students they went back to their class and brainstormed where they should take pictures of Stanley in our school to share with our new friends. Our school is VERY different from Jennifer's school in Wisconsin, for one her school is K-12 and about 450 students and our school is K-5 and about 950 students!

The class took their Flat Stanley's and a camera around the school for a week. After they took pictures, we had a writing session where the students, their teacher, Mrs. Archibald and I helped them to caption the pictures they took. We then did something pretty cool, we put the photos up on the Mimio board and we had the kids write on the picture who was in the picture. We were then able to save the pictures as jpegs to add to our Animoto video. It added another special touch to our project.

I took one of the Flat Stanley's to Chicago with me and he seemed to have a great time at the Follett Software user conference and at the ST. Patrick's day Parade with me!

Our finished product was an Animoto video that I produced. I just finished it tonight and sent it on to Jennifer in Wisconsin. She will be sending to us in a week or so a Smilebox presentation of her students' experience with our Flat Stanley's. My students can't WAIT to see where their Flat Stanley's went!

This was my first experience of collaborating with another school and with a teacher in my building and it was such a GREAT experience. I can't wait to do more collaborating between my school and other schools near and far. Next up, hopefully a Skype visit with our new friends in Wisconsin!

Hello from Chicago!

I am in Chicago for the first Follett Software User Conference. You may remember the CHEESY video I made which won me a full scholasrship to this conference. I am so glad I have the ability to be cheesy!

The conference started yesterday afternoon with some round tables. I was in one on student engagement. It is always so great for me to hear what other schools/libraries in other parts of the country (and in this case the world since there were two people from Canada in our session) are doing. It also makes me feel SOOO thankful for what I have in my school.

The Follett people also really know how to make you feel welcome. They had a great opening reception last night with a local arts high school jazz band and free drinks and food. I am really looking forward to today's sessions and to meet some people I have been getting to know on Twitter (@MrSchuReads & @shannonmmiller ).

I will leave you with a picture of Flat Stanley in Chicago. I am working on a project with one of my first grade classes and a first grade class from Viola, WI (@jmalphy ). I will blog more about the project when we are done, but so far my kids are LOVING it! Here is what Jennifer has to say about our project so far on her blog.

Read Across America Day Celebration

Because of a state writing test that our fifth grade students had to take on Wednesday, we moved our Read Across America celebration to Friday, which is actually a great day to do such celebrations, teachers are much more receptive to doing special things on Fridays!

Our reading specialist arranged to have books given to each teacher for their classroom and a guest reader to visit each classroom. Some of the guest readers included people from inside our school community (Principal, Assistant Principals, technology specialist etc..) and people from outside our school. I arranged to have the mascot from our local minor league baseball team, the Gwinnett Braves and a local tv weather man (Steve Milone from Fox 5) come and participate in our reading celebration. A tradition I started when I worked at St. John Neumann continued again this year, having the TEACHERS dress like a book character. We had some great ones, Pippi Longstocking, Captain Underpants and of course the Cat in the Hat. I gave all the teachers who participated a $10 gift certificate to our book fair (which was ending on Friday). I had been working on my costume ever since I saw the 360 theater production of Peter Pan in Atlanta, I was Tinker Bell and my costume included a light up skirt and lights in my hair - it was FABULOUS! We also had the kids participate by having crazy hair day. The students were encouraged to bring in $1 and they could wear their hair as CRAZY as they could get it. The proceeds from crazy hair day go toward our literacy team and purchasing new books for our book room.

Here is a short video of some of the fun we had on Friday!