This Week in Library:

Library Visits

We have had an amazing week in the library! All the classes have visited and learned about the rules and expectations while in the library for class or for independent activity times. K-1 classes will be waiting to check out until they practice becoming great book protectors and uses, while 3-5 have books in their hands. 2nd grade will be checking their books out next week! 

5 Finger Rule

We are practicing using the 5 Finger Rule to help ourselves find good fit books for our reading time. Students can help themselve determine if a book is a good fit for their reading level by following these steps:

1. Choose a book
2. Open to any page
3. Begin reading
4. Hold a finger up for each word that is unknown
5. 2-3 fingers means a good fit  4-5 fingers means it's too hard 

Students can use this strategy with anywhere they can find books they might want to read.

Week's Statistics 

• We had 369 books checked out this week! 
• 603 students visited the library 
• 24 classes came in
• 5th grade started their digital library break out activity'
• 20 new Bluebonnet award nominee books were added to our collection

Texas Bluebonnet Award Program

Be looking for letters to come home next week about our Texas Bluebonnet program. Students in grades 3-5 must read at least 5 to be able to participate in the voting booth in January. Students who read all 20 books will receive a special certificate and prize. Those that read their 5 book minimum to vote will get a certificate recognizing their accomplishments! I am excited to see which books will win for our campus and the state of Texas. There are some amazing ones this year!

New Year, New Library

As we start the 2019-2020 school year we have had some incredible changes within the library on our campus! I, Mrs. Gherman am now your full time librarian; while Mrs. Clark remains as your library assistant. Our fiction section has been modified to reflect genrefication, adding to the ease of our students finding the types of books they like to read a bit easier. This is still a work in progress as we are beginning to label all of the books to make for ease of returns and shelving as well! New labels will be added to the books, so that students will become more familiar with the different fiction genres and increase their awareness of what each genre's writing expresses.

Our floor plan looks completely different than it has in the past, giving us more seating options, work areas, and giving the library a more open feeling.

 

 The library schedule has created small class sizes for library times and has opened up several blocks of time for student use without classes in session. Soon the Makerspace will be introduced and students will be able to start their creating, collaboration, and computational thinking within the library space!

This upcoming week we will be full swing with our library class schedule! This past week Mrs. Clark and myself completed data entry ensuring that all of our newly registered students were in the system and ready to check out books. We also created the classes for our STAR 360 assessment program.

We are most excited about the number of new books that we are working on to get cataloged, bar-coded and ready for the shelves! We now have all of the 2019 Bluebonnet Award Nominated books and a whole cart full of new titles for our students to read. This year our collection will be growing with the help of student and teacher input.

Most of all I can't forget to mention the number of Chromebooks that Mrs. Clark and I prepared for our students! So far we added 13 blended learning classrooms totaling 275 Chromebooks!!! Our campus just released the last wave of blended learning cohort winners, 5 more classrooms, bringing our campus to almost 1:1 ration of digital products to create blended learning!! Amazing!