Book Swap Station

Hello!
I have an idea for you for books that you’ve weeded from your library. I set up a Book Swap Station that sits outside the library door so that anyone can stop by and swap a book to take home and read. Mine looks like this:

We obtained this small bookcase and decided it would be perfect for our swap station. I encourage students to take a book if they need one and bring another one later to substitute. (I really don’t worry about whether or not they bring one back or not.) You can see that some of the books have black markings on the lower spine. This is where we mark out our spine label for our discarded books. Others have been either donated by families or teachers wanting to de-clutter their classrooms. We just put them inside here and one of my Library Club members will straighten it as needed.
My sign is difficult to read in the first picture, so I took a close-up for you.

My Swap Deposit Box or Book Swap Drop Box sits just inside the library door. I decided that if I had one available, it would help in case students decided to trade out any titles that might possibly be inappropriate. I just took a nice larger box with a good lid and covered it with the blue bulletin board paper. It looks nice and just about any book will fit inside it.

On occasion, I set out a table in the hallway right outside the library door with a pile of books on it and a sign that says “FREE”. The books disappear like candy.

Rarely, but at times we weed a book that a particular teacher just loves and still uses. We discard it from our computer and just gift that teacher with the book.

All of these are ways that weeded books can still be useful. I am working on weeding in my library. It is hard to do, but I know that my library will be better off by weeding out books that are no longer valuable to our curriculum or worth the shelf space.

I hope you had a great vacation and are ready for the last push until June.

Audrey

NAD Teacher's Convention 2018

Hello,

We recently had an in-service for our conference and during the announcements, it was mentioned that the next SDA Teacher’s Convention is coming up in August 2018. That’s about a year and a half from now, but I started thinking.

At the last convention in Nashville, I gave presentations. In 2012 I spoke about organizing your small school library and also moderated a session for a Library Shop Talk. I noticed at the 2006 convention that there were Shop Talks for just about every possible subject or grade level that could be EXCEPT for Library. I decided that there would be one even if I had to moderate it. The reason I spoke about Organizing Your Small School Library because Patti Revolinski had enlisted me to help organize a small school library in the summers and by 2012 we had worked on four libraries and learned a lot. I knew that I could not get to every single small school and thought if I showed what we had done other schools could do what we had done.

I am considering giving a presentation in 2018 and would like to solicit your input. What kind of information would you like to see offered at the convention? Library organization, lists of books similar to what I send out periodically, a place to ask questions and see what others do with their small school libraries? You may have other ideas, too.

If you have any thoughts, please send me an email with your suggestions.

Have a great week and also a wonderful spring vacation next week!

Audrey

New Books on Emotions

Hello,

I just bought a set of books on feelings and emotions. This particular set is geared for the K-2 grade level.

Each book in this set describe an emotion. The first page describes the particular feeling and may give a synonym for the feeling. For example, the book Afraid begins “We feel uneasy when we are afraid. It is an emotion.” The books each then go on and give examples of when one might feel or experience that emotion. Examples include “Abby hugs her teddy bear. She is afraid of the dark.” “Kim watches a movie. It is scary. She feels afraid.”

At the end of the book there are strategies to use when we are feeling the emotion. For the book Afraid, they suggest these things to do: draw what you’re afraid of and rip it up, learn about what scares you, face your fear with friends or family, think of your favorite happy moment. For the book Love, they suggest some things to do to make others feel loved.
The books are illustrated with photographs of children of many cultures are represented in each book.

This set came in a preview box and I originally hadn’t planned to purchase them, but our Kindergarten teachers came by to look at them and loved them. In fact, they were in the middle of a unit on feelings at that same time, so we let them take the books to use immediately. I know this set is meant for young children, but I also thought that an older student who is having similar issues might read it to a younger student and learn from it.

In this set, there are six books. The titles are Afraid, Angry, Happy, Love, Sad, and Surprised. They are published by Abdo Kids, $18.95 each, written by Julie Murray. For more information go to abdopublishing.com.

Have a great week!

Audrey