First Gaming Day

As I quickly scratch off the remaining calendar days for this year, I am stunned to realize there are only 29 days left! We have been so busy in the media center, most recently to host our first gaming day.
Why should students play games in the media center? I had School Library Journal to thank for the idea. Over a period of three years, I have been reading about more schools, specifically middle schools, offering this activity to their students. Purpose varied from parent engagement activities to reading rewards. Ours was a data-driven decision.
As a member of our school's Literacy Data Team and Leadership Committee, I am immersed in discussions of data-driven planning. I wanted to see how our numbers could help drive student interaction. Our circulation data in December showed that our sixth graders were checking out an abundance of books (they will have their day soon, don't worry!), but our 8th grade was seriously lagging with an appalling 81 books for the entire grade level!
Consulting with the Language Arts teachers, I talked about ways we could boost reading interest in these students. Mrs. Senseney was excited about engaging her students, so we jumped right in to begin planning together. We drafted and implemented a Google docs student survey to target specific reasons students may not be choosing reading as an activity. Based on that data, we talked about ways to introduce students to books they may want to read.
I created a high-interest book pass with teen themes. On another visit, they learned about the Michael J. Printz award books we have in our collection. Ms. Senseney extended this reading encouragement in the classroom with discussions and reading logs.
April data showed that those particular students jumped 30% in their circulation! I was so proud of them, I honestly teared up! Mrs. Senseney and I were so excited for them, that we decided we had to do something to celebrate their efforts.
With the help of the invaluable Mrs. Stevens, our Media Assistant, we all got together to bring in our gaming systems and arrange for snacks. I put together a booktalk of all our books related to games and gaming. We kept it under wraps until the students were bursting with curiosity on the big day!
We had such great fun that the day went quickly. We had four classes of students beaming with happiness and pride in their efforts, and a school full of students asking how they can have this opportunity too. I am thrilled that it was such a success and hope to continue this tradition next year.

Spring Flings

News and Observer: Eastern Wake News
Article published Apr 10, 2011
WMS Students Turn Media Center Into Poetry Jam

Another Scholastic Book Fair passed by this year.
To celebrate our Family Night, our staff teamed up to host a fun Literacy Night Event.
Although we would have liked to see more families participate, those who did visit were treated to a beatnik-style Poetry Jam. Our own student volunteers served coffee, soda and cookies in a cafe'setting. Student poets performed poetry they wrote and a poem from their favorite author. Some Jazz Band members kept the beat with keyboards, drums and a saxophone.
Dig?

Other stations included vocabulary instruction strategies, text summarizing, read-and-say-something, booktalks featuring books from our fair and EOG highlighting strategies. These all help our students and parents read to learn and learn to read together. We had some great parental compliments!

Overall, the book fair was a success, in spite of the gloomy economy. Students had a great time visiting and helping out with our Student Crew over the last two weeks. Although we missed our goal by only $24.00, we were able to get almost $1200.00 in books for the library and classrooms!! We also had some leftover cash that the PTA will hold for fun activities coming up...
Until next year, happy reading and enjoy all our new books in our

media center.

Wordle of the library life

NHL All-Star Weekend

This is my other professional life. When I'm not looking at books or computer screens, I'm looking at monitors and well, computer screens.

A book about Nothing by Janne Teller

Nothing is a morbid, philosophical mind-bender by Janne Teller. Denmark is the setting for Teller's story, and the name she chose for the town is thought-provoking itself. Taering is a Danish word for "corrode, consume and eat through". The young teens in the town assimilate to their town's namesake.

Pierre Anton is a nihilist who walks away from his schooling to while away the hours in a plum tree. He accosts his former classmates on their way to school with his doctrine that life has no meaning. "Nothing matters, so nothing is worth doing." he proclaims. This infuriates his former classmates, who first try to pelt him with stones to change his perspective. When this fails, they vow to collectively build a "heap of meaning".

They found an abandoned sawmill where they decided to create their heap. At first, they brought favorite items like Dungeons and Dragons books, earrings, and sandals. Resistance began to develop as more meaningful items were suggested for the heap. Suggestions soon became vengeful demands. Their demands for each other became more and more insidious, until morbidity began piling on the heap: a child's exhumed coffin, a sacred prayer rug, the town church's large crucifix, and other horrifying, life-altering sacrifices.

By stripping themselves of their most valuable or sacred items, the teens sank to demoralizing behaviors. Their trials to create a heap of meaning irrevocably changed the teens' personalities. Sophie was a girl who became eerily calm in the process of brutalizing, macabre actions. "...she was rubbing off on the rest of us. What was to happen was a necessary sacrifice in our struggle for the meaning." Everyone had to participate in losing something precious to them for all to experience the loss. Their ultimate loss occured with Pierre Anton's reaction to their sacrifices.

Nothing is a read-alike for Lord of the Flies lovers. Teller's style of repeating words and using reverse superlatives throughout the book help the reader pause to experience the emotions of the characters: "little bit, tiny, little, smaller, nothing." Although the content is far too morbid and grotesque for the middle school ages, I would love to see a teacher take on the challenge of using this with an advanced high school literature course. Existentialism is a difficult concept to teach, but this novel paints a vivid picture of the experience.

January 2011

What a whirlwind month! We hit the ground running right after our winter break.
The entire 8th Grade worked on a Causes of the American Civil War project. This team-based activity required teams of students to research a topic with quality print and online resources, find and properly credit photos and correctly cite all their sources in MLA format. Students were required to take hand-written notes to help process the information, rather than the common copy-and-paste method of acquiring information. We have some more work to do in that area, but the project was an overall success!

I am currently teaching my very favorite lesson - The Camera Eye. I come from a family of amateur photographers, myself included. I have a photography 'museum' set up where students can see, touch and read about the various types of cameras, film and editing tools from 1908 through today. Students learn about the history of the camera, use the SMARTboard to touch and learn about the anatomy of the human eye, and how the parts of the eye are similar to the mechanics of a camera. The students have so much fun touching real film and looking at the parts of the camera. Next week, the science teachers will work with the students dissecting a cow eye... ewwww! The local newspaper even came out to do a story on our lesson! I have a great time sharing my passion for photography and my family history.

All our teams are now on a rotating schedule to ensure that all our students have access to quality reading materials. It is so important to allow students to take ownership in choosing what they want to read. It helps them develop their identity as readers.

January continues to be a busy month with so many activities planned! We will the 6th and 7th grade classes for an inferencing lesson using "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" and Charlie Chaplin films. Renaissance research is up next for our 6th Grade Social Studies classes. We have Computer Skills testing and a WCPSS workshop planned in January too!

Our Battle of the Books team is in the home stretch for the upcoming Battle of the Books competition in early March. Most of the books on the list have been read, we are meeting twice weekly to drill on our questions and we try to sneak some fun activities in too, like popcorn and a movie next week. The movie is based on "My Dog Skip" by Willie Morris, but it is still fun to point out how the movie script is different than the text.

Ms. Craig, Ms. Shepard and I are moving forward on a new venture to create a local "Guys Read" chapter at WMS. Guys Read is a program created by award-winning author Jon Scieszka, who believes that boys will find interest in reading if we can teach them how to find books they will be interested in reading. This boy-friendly club will focus on hands-on reading and making literacy fun.

We invite our community leaders to stop by to see how much our students benefit from our School Library Media Center. Feel free to call me to set up a visit. We can also use male guest speakers to talk with our Guys Read club about the importance of reading in your daily life. My office number is (919)365-1677.

Winter 2010-2011

Our media center has been buzzing with activity this year!
Our 6th Grade explored Elements of Fiction through writing
their own picture book, used SAS in Schools Technology to write
a short story, researched ancient Greece,and participated in Book Passes
in various themes.

Our 7th Grade have selected novels for book reports, researched Middle
Eastern Conflict using a Pathfinder and writing their problem/solution
paper on the topic.

8th Grade learned about a Colonial Trade through extensive research and
discovered hands-on non-fiction elements through interactive stations.

Our school-wide literacy initiative is moving ahead with lots of staff
development on reading, vocabulary and writing strategies. We are training
our staff to be highly qualified teachers who employ instructional technologies
for engaging, 21st Century lessons. So far this year, teachers have gotten
instruction or refreshers on SAS in Schools, Destiny OPAC, Today's Meet chat tool and SMARTboard training for our classroom SMARTboards. Every room has one now!

We just started a new method of getting books into the hands of our students.
Students in all grade levels visit our media center at least once each three weeks
to have access to text they choose. We share our reading experiences through
Destiny's rating system, displays and signs. Currently, our staff members are displaying "What I Am Reading" signs throughout the building. The idea is to share
great books and other forms of text with out students, showing them that literacy
lasts a lifetime!

Our Battle of the Books team is in full-swing, hoping to raise our
performance standing a few more notches this year! We are reading and
creating questions, then using technology to dig deeper. During our last
meeting, students used remote responders to answer questions about five
of the books on our list. We will be working with Voice Thread to summarize
stories after the winter break.

The Stage Crew has gotten their introduction to the audio and video equipment in our gorgeous auditorium. We will continue working toward the goal of working independently and effeciently to produce and broadcast in-school events.

We are excited to welcome 6th and 8th grade in December to explore the Middle
Ages and the world's Oceans through research and project-based learning. We have
guest speakers planned to talk about sound and technologies of video games. What
will January bring to our media center?