Scholastic Book Fair Books

Hello,
Our Scholastic Book Fair is running this week and I found a few titles that I thought you might like.
There are a number of books about war which seem to be very attractive to the boys at our school. One is a true story about Danish teenage boys are unhappy that the adults do not resist the Nazi occupation, so they start their own ‘Nazi Resistance’ Club named after Winston Churchill. They sabotage the Nazis and are eventually discovered and imprisoned. This gets the adults going, so they began to also resist. The title is The Boys Who Challenged Hitler.

Choosing Courage tells true stories of courageous acts, and War Dogs gives information and stories about the dogs who help our soldiers in the field.

Deborah Hopkinson is well-known for her research into her non-fiction books. If I see her name on a book, I purchase it knowing it will be interesting and also true. At our book fair, there are two books by her; Titanic and Courage and Defiance. Courage and Defiance is about spies, saboteurs, and survivors in World War 2 in Denmark. I assume you can guess what the Titanic book is about, but this book contains stories about the survivors of the Titanic, as well as information. I may have told you about this one in a previous post.

There is one World War 2 novel that has a great cover. The Enemy Above is about a boy who has been hiding and trying not to be discovered, but finally has had enough and doesn’t try to hide any longer. It sounded quite exciting.

There are three picture books that I especially like. Born in the Wild has lovely illustrations about baby wild animals along with short paragraphs that give information about each baby animal. The end of the book has a few pages with more information on each animal for the parent reader. Bugs in my Hair is about a child who gets lice. It is funny, informative, and may help students learn more about lice and how NOT to get it! The illustrations are comical and the words are as well. It would be a good class book that may help the stigma of lice lessen. Finding Winnie is the true story of that famous bear, Winnie the Pooh. We learn the background of Christopher Robin and how he became fascinated with Winnie.

The last one is 365 Things to do With Lego Bricks. Legos are a big thing here and I have a lot of books about Legos. They all are out to students most of the time, but this one is new, so I guess I will be adding it to our collection.

I hope you enjoy these books. If you have a Scholastic book fair at your school, you will be able to take a closer look. If you don’t have Scholastic book fair, check your local public schools. They might host one and you would be welcome to visit their fair and buy books. You can also get these through the Scholastic site or pretty much any book store.
Enjoy!
Audrey

Movies in the Library?

Greetings!

We have had a number of VHS tapes in our school library that were used years ago by teachers who wanted something special for a class party or just before vacation or to illustrate a lit set that they had read. About 5 or more years ago, I began to buy only DVDs rather than VHS because fewer and fewer teachers could play VHS in their classrooms. I began replacing the ones that teachers used regularly and added more that were requested, and now I have a decent DVD section for our teachers to use.

I have a nice collection of Reading Rainbow DVDs for teachers to use. I also have some Bill Nye, Science Guy plus other science subjects that teachers have requested. A couple of years ago, our junior high science teachers asked if I had any movies about DNA, cells, and diseases. I searched and found some that were age-appropriate and added them to our collection.
Most of the DVDs I acquired through Library Video, an educational resource. If you order from them, you will receive regular catalogs. I believe that you can also click and view clips from some of the movies.

Feature Films for Families has many feature length movies that have been ‘cleaned up’ for family viewing. Scenes that may contain language issues or sex issues have been altered or deleted. They advertise they have family movies with family values. It is another option for choosing movies with good themes. When I checked their website, I noticed a link to request a free DVD.

I know that there is a lot of material available through YouTube and it is quick to view from there. You might also check out TeacherTube that is geared toward educational sources.

So what happened to our old VHS tapes? A few years ago, I moved most of the VHS movies to a more central location in the library and allowed students to check them out. Each year we have noticed that fewer kids check them out and this year I am replacing them with DVDs for children and families to check out. I took the VHS tapes and evaluated each one for content to see if the exact title might still be a good option to have in the library. Then I searched in Library Video for titles. After a number of misses, I then went to Amazon.com and was able to find most of the titles available. This taught me to search multiple sites to find what I wanted and to price check. Amazon.com was either very similar or cheaper. (Plus – I am a Prime member and got free shipping!)

If you come to visit my library, you will find very few VHS tapes. They are the ones that I have been unable to replace in DVD format, but I haven’t given up yet!

Have a great week!

Audrey


Sources for movies:
1. Library Video – for educational and entertainment DVDs
2. Feature Films for Families - http://www.familytv.com/
3. Amazon.com - if you know what you are looking for
4. Commonsensemedia.com - to review movies and evaluate appropriateness

Ideas for Weeding Your Library

Hello,

Last week I was in Seattle for a conference titled “101 Best Strategies to Increase the Effectiveness of Your School Library Program”. It was a BER (Bureau of Education and Research) seminar. If you have never been to one of these, I urge you to attend one if at all possible. They have wonderful presenters and they are quite entertaining.

Deborah Ford was the presenter for this seminar. I have had the pleasure of attending one of her BER Seminars previously, so I knew this would be good.

She spoke to us about the importance of weeding our libraries and identifying our worst areas. One great idea that I took away was to buy while you weed. When you find a book that is important to your library, but is either too tattered or missing pages, or too old, put it on your list to buy an updated copy.

Since weeding is such a difficult job for most of us, Deb suggests we have a five-year plan. This would take the library in sections to weed and renew titles as needed, instead of trying to do it all at once. That actually makes a lot more sense and isn’t so overwhelming.

Another idea about weeding is to enlist experts for help. For example, it may be hard to know what is worthwhile in the chemistry section. If you teach in a small school, you may have a parent who is a chemist. Why not ask them to come in and check out that section and help you weed it? If you are in a larger school, find the science teacher and ask him or her to go through those sections to evaluate what is worthy of shelf space or not. Put the books on a table to make it easier for them and ask them for 5 – 10 minutes of their time to look them over. This also has the added benefit of letting your science teacher know what resources the library has. Maybe those books will be used a bit more often.

If you are unsure of yourself weeding your library and really don’t know what to weed, check out my blog. Sdalibrarian.blogspot.com. In 2015 I wrote weekly posts beginning in January with a quick weeding criteria, then in March, April, and May with one section at a time. My posts describe the section and what to weed out. Feel free to follow me or at least bookmark the site so you can refer to it as needed. Just so you know, I put on the blog the same thing I post to you each week. It is a place to find all my weekly emails since I began in 2009.

I hope you have a great week.

Audrey

Library Collection Guidelines

Hello!
I am often asked if there is a guideline that specifies how many of each kind of book should we have in our libraries. There is, but remember that it is just a guideline.
Today I am going to have a quick review of Dewey and approximately how many books you should have in each section.

The 000s consist of general information. This is information that cannot be catalogued in one section. Examples would include Question and Answer books with questions on a variety of subjects. I show our students one and comment that the book has questions on astronomy, animals, plants, buildings, history, holidays, and more, so where would be put it? In general information. This section would have about 2 – 5% of your K – 8 library. For a small library of about 4000 books, this would be about 80 – 200 books.

The 100s about books on philosophy, or books about me. We use the terms ‘how I think and feel’ to help describe this section. This is the smallest section consisting of 0.5% of the library or about 20 books. Some titles we have read like this: How Do I Deal with Lying?, and How Do I Deal with Competitiveness?

In the 200s, we have books about religion. Bible stories, books about Bible characters, books about other religions, Adventist books, devotionals, and such belong here. In our schools, we will have many more than the guidelines suggest, so don’t worry. The suggestion is about 1 – 2% or about 40 – 80 books.

The 300s are the Social Science books. There are many categories in this section including holidays, military, careers, recycling, education, folklore, and more. This section should have about 5 – 10% of your library. That would be approximately 200 – 400 books, so it is a medium-size section.

In the 400s, we find books about Language including dictionaries, English grammar, and other languages. We like the First 100 Words in . . . series. Those books are great to use to learn words since they have pictures of common items with the foreign word by the picture. A few years ago I asked the students what languages they would like to see in our library and added some of their ideas. Try to have about 0.5% here, about 20 books.

Pure Science is the 500s. This is one of our larger sections. Check each of the sciences and try to have books for each subject. We have books on Science Fairs, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, mammals, birds, insects, fish, fossils, dinosaurs, math, plants, and more. This section should include about 10% of your library, or 400 books.

Applied Science also should include about the same number of books – 400. The 600s include pets, buildings, food, cookbooks, medicine, cars and other vehicles, trains, ships, inventions, survival, agriculture, manufacturing, toys, and more.

The 700s are Fine Arts and Recreation including crafts, hobbies, art, artists, music, sports, and games, riddles, joke books, and more. About 5% of the library or 200 books in this section are the guidelines.

The 800s include poetry and literature or stories. This is most likely your largest section taking about 25% of your library. Check your shelves and see if you have poetry books. That is often a section that is either missing or quite low when I visit other libraries. Make sure that the poetry books have kid-friendly books available. Shel Silverstein is a good choice, but there are other books that work nicely, too. All the fiction or chapter story books go here. You’ll have about 1000 here.

The 900s are the History, Geography, and Biography books. This would be about 20% of your library or 800 books. Our library separates the Biography into its own section, and I believe that makes it easier for children to find biographies, and I recommend you do the same.

That ends the Dewey section, but you still need a healthy picture book section. Some people call these ‘Easy’ books, but for a number of years librarians have changed the term to ‘Everybody’ books because they are for everybody. The guidelines suggest about 25% of your library consist of picture books so that would be about 1000.

Now, I am well aware that these percentages do NOT add up to 100%. They are guidelines. I would suggest that you check your libraries and see if there are any areas where you are quite low or missing subjects and work to fill in any gaps or holes you might have.

If you need suggestions for your gaps, please contact me. You might not be the only one. I may be able to help.

Have a great week!

Audrey