Christmas Ornament Contest

Greetings!
I told you about my ornament contest a few weeks ago. Students who wanted to enter the contest could make an ornament for the library Christmas tree. The directions were to make or decorate an ornament that fits the theme of Books and Reading. Well, last week I got the ornaments in and had only twelve students enter. All the entries were from grades 5 and under. I thought you might like to see the entries I got. A few were quite clever.

I hope you have a wonderful holiday.

Audrey

Christmas Display

Greetings!

This is the time of year to pull out all your Christmas books and make a great display. Put them in like categories and display them together. For example, put all the ones about Jesus’ birth together with a small Nativity set. You can put a small Christmas tree on a table and books about Christmas trees or even just trees around it.

Maybe you have a lot of books by one author such as Patricia Polacco. Find a photo of the author on Google Images, (don’t forget to copy the source ) print it out and put it in a Lucite frame or laminate it so students can know what the author looks like. You can also put some biographical information there, too. This helps students realize that authors are real people.

Even with a wide variety of Christmas books, you can still put some kind of Christmas decoration or even just some garland around the books. If you put some snowmen around, you can even leave those up for a month or so afterwards! (I told you that I do not like to decorate!)

I hope you have a great week. Don’t overdo or you’ll get sick.

Audrey

Christmas in the Library

Greetings!

I hope you got some much needed rest over the short Thanksgiving break. Now we turn quickly to the coming Christmas holiday. I will tell you a secret. I don’t really like decorating for Christmas. I have a large space and it is full of books and shelves and tables and adding even more stuff in there looks cluttered at times. Plus it only lasts for a couple of weeks, so it seems like a waste of time.

HOWEVER – I do decorate for the following reasons.

1. The children love to come in and see the Christmas decorations.
2. It makes the library look inviting and festive.
3. I have helpers to put it up and take it down!

I haven’t really started much decorating yet, but we will put our library tree (artificial) up today. And that brings me to my post for this week. I have a contest going. Students who wish to enter the contest can make an ornament for the library Christmas tree. They need to make or decorate an ornament that fits the theme of Books and Reading. Their ornament needs to have a tag with two things on the tag – the title of the book the ornament represents and the student’s full name. These ornaments are due next week and winners will be chosen from each grade level. The ornaments will be theirs to keep and they can take them home just before vacation.

Two years ago I did this same contest and got exactly 12 ornaments. All from grades 3 and under. My intention was to choose three from each wing which would have been 12 in all, so I just declared each of them winners. I gave them a gift certificate for a book from the Scholastic Book Fair that would come in the spring and one of our teachers who is a wonderful photographer took their pictures which we made into posters and put up on the empty wall above the stacks. All in all it was a success. This time I made the change to specify that the ornament must have a tag with the name of the book on it because one ornament looked like a bead string and I simply could not guess what book it was supposed to represent!

Wouldn’t this be a great idea for a classroom to do a book report ornament? They could make an ornament to represent the book they read, tell about it in class and then hang it on the tree. Or you could keep track of the books they read over the next few weeks. They can hang an ornament for each book they read.

Here are the posters we made and put on the wall. Each student is holding a favorite book similar to the posters that ALA Graphics puts out. These posters are 16 inches by 24 inches, so they really are fairly large, but look much smaller up high. Keep that in mind if you decide to do something like this.

Well, I need to go pull down my Christmas decorations and get started or the holiday (at school) will be over before I get going!

I hope you have a great week. Take your vitamins! You will need the energy.
Audrey

Andrew Clements books

Greetings!

I just read the newest Andrew Clements book called About Average. Jordan is in sixth grade and is neither tall nor short, not blond nor brunette, not fat, nor thin – but average. Her grades are average. She sings OK, but is not good enough to have a solo. It seems to Jordan that others in her class are much more talented than she it.

Jordan has a crush on a boy but this does not take over the story. She also is a really nice girl and I love how she handles a bullying situation when it occurs. Jordan throws away some papers and one of the girls finds them and then begins to read them aloud with exaggerated expression to make fun of Jordan. Jordan thinks and decides that no matter what that girl does to her, she will be nice. My first thought was that Jordan was heaping coals of fire on the girl’s head, but that term was not mentioned.

Jordan does eventually do something that is above average near the end of her sixth grade year. She performs a heroic act when a tornado comes and the orchestra director is knocked unconscious. She quickly organizes the students to action and they take refuge under the grand piano surrounded by music stands and covered with the velvet curtains from the stage.

Andrew Clements is a good writer and his books are very popular. He always has a lesson buried in the story so it doesn’t sound preachy. If you don’t’ have any of his books AND you are in an elementary school, I would strongly suggest you purchase some of them. The ones I suggest you purchase are:

Frindle
Trouble-Maker
No Talking
Lunch Money
The Report Card
The School Story
Lost and Found
Extra Credit
A Week in the Woods
The Landry News
The Last Holiday Concert
Room One: A Mystery or Two
The Janitor’s Boy
The Jacket

You might want to stay away from Things Not Seen, Things Hoped For, and Things that Are. Even though the titles sound a bit religious, they are not. Read the blurbs or the books before you decide to put it in your library. I have chosen not to put them in ours.

I hope you have a great Thanksgiving vacation. I’ll be in Seattle visiting my son. I’m looking forward to the break.

Audrey

Books for your Library

Greetings!

This week I have some more books to interest you. I just pulled some random titles off my cart. There is no theme here, just books that I think will be good additions to an elementary school library.

Mrs. Harkness and the Panda by Alicia Potter is about a real person and how she and her expedition team braved the odds to bring the first panda, Su Lin, to the United States in 1936. There is a timeline, an author’s note and photographs to support the watercolor drawings of the story.

If your school is like ours, you have students who love Legos. We have a few Lego books and they never seem to be on the shelf very long. Here is a new one published in 2011 with ideas from Lego fans. I have a feeling that I should have bought more than one copy! The Legos Idea Book.

It’s difficult for children to understand about chronic illness. When Pete’s Dad Got Sick by Kathleen Long Bostrom is a great way to open up the conversation for children and families. The book is written from a Christian perspective and Pete asks his dad why God would give him fast legs, then take them away. His father replies that God didn’t take them away. Sometimes people get sick or hurt. He continues to trust that God wants what is best for us and claims the Bible promise “I can do everything by the power of Christ.” The illustrations are realistic drawings. At the end of the story are a few pages of parental helps from a clinical psychologist. This is one of the books from the series Helping Kids Heal published by Zonderkidz.

Do you have a student with autism? My Friend Has Autism by Amanda Doering Tourville helps explain in a simple way what a child with autism may act like and how students can understand more about them and the disorder. On certain pages a box titled “Did You Know?” gives more information about the characteristic described on that page to help further understanding.

We have a young student that loves Poison Dart Frogs and when I saw this book in a preview box, I had to get it. The Life Cycle of a Poison Dart Frog by Anna Kingston shows the wide variety of these frogs and the bright colors they have. It is truly a beautiful book. I love that the illustrations are photographs rather than drawings.

Bird Talk by Lita Judge is subtitled What Birds are Saying and Why. Twenty-eight different birds are mentioned and what their calls and actions mean. One example is the North American Killdeer who feigns a broken wing to attract enemies away from her eggs. The author’s lovely realistic pen and watercolor illustrations support the text.

I hope you have a great week.

Audrey

Holiday Books

Greetings!

The holidays are fast approaching and will be here before we can turn around. Pull out your holiday books and decide what you want to read to the students and what you can put on a display. I pull out the books that I am planning to read aloud weeks before so they can’t get their hands on them and I know they will be ready for my lesson.


Here are a few that I love to share with the kids.


If your kids watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, read this book to them about how the balloons of the parade began. This is the true story of the man behind the balloons – a puppeteer named Tony Sarg. I didn’t know that the reason the puppet/balloons began was because Macy’s put live animals in the parade which frightened the children. So they asked Tony to think of something spectacular. As we all know, he certainly did. Read Balloons Over Broadway by Melissa Sweet.

Emily Arnold McCully writes a great story and has taken an incident from history and embellished it. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid along with some other outlaws hosted a Thanksgiving banquet at Browns’ Hole, Utah. McCully has taken Ann Bassett’s account of this banquet and has added two fictional guests to the table. All ages will enjoy this exciting story about the Wild West and outlaws. Read An Outlaw Thanksgiving by Emily Arnold McCully.

Cranberry Thanksgiving written by Wende and Harry Devlin is a story about a little girl named Maggie and her grandmother who has a secret recipe for cranberry bread. Maggie invites the scruffy, uncouth neighbor, Mr. Whiskers, for Thanksgiving dinner even though Grandmother does not like him or trust him. Grandmother has invited a handsome stranger from the town who is quite dapper. Of course, the handsome stranger ends up being the one who is trying to steal the secret recipe and Mr. Whiskers saves the day. I plan to make some cranberry bread from the recipe in the back of the book and have small pieces for the students to taste when I read this one. If your kids like this story, read Cranberry Christmas. Mr. Whiskers’ sister is coming to visit and to take him back with her because she thinks he can’t take care of himself properly. Also, a mean neighbor, Cyrus Grape won’t let anyone skate on his pond and all the children are unhappy about it. Things work out so that Mr. Whiskers doesn’t have to move away and the children get to skate on the pond after all. Included is a recipe for cranberry cookies, too.

If you like books where you can share a treat, you’ll love The Legend of the Candy Cane by Lori Walburg. We have used this book a couple of times in our school assembly near Christmas and at the end all the kids get a miniature candy cane. The candy cane can be turned curved end down to make a ‘J’ for Jesus, the curved end up to make a staff to remind us that the shepherds were the first to learn of Jesus’ birth, and red stripe to remind us that ‘by His stripes we are healed’. The illustrations by James Bernardin are lovely paintings that add richness to the story.

The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey by Susan Wojciechowski and illustrated by P. J. Lynch is another beautiful book . A widow commissions a gruf and gloomy wood carver to replace a crèche which had been lost. She requests that her son be allowed to watch the carver as he works. The wood carver lives a hermit-like life and doesn’t want to be friendly, but as the days and weeks progress, he slowly puts his personal sorrow aside and lets the friendliness of the child and his mother bring warmth to his cold heart. There is a movie made from this book that is really special, too.

Do you have a favorite Thanksgiving or Christmas story that you would like to share with other teachers through this post? Send me the information and I’ll be glad to pass this along.

Have a great week.

Audrey

Book Swap

Hello,

I’ve mentioned the idea of having a Book Swap previously, but it has been a while and I thought you might not mind a repeat. One student came to me at the first of the year and asked if we were going to have a book swap this year. We talked about it and his recommendation was to have two book swaps; one in December and another one again in May. I told him that he had a good idea and to remind me about it the first of November. This morning he came to my desk, and reminded me. I guess it is close enough to the first of November to remind me, so I thanked him and he went on his way.

Here’s what I do when I have a book swap.

A few weeks before the swap I make an announcement letting students and parents know about the swap, what kind of books to bring, and what to expect. I put this in our newsletter and I put up posters around the school. I also announce it during library classes for a week or two before the swap.

I hold the Book Swap for only one day and a Wednesday works best for me. I don’t have it on Thursday or Friday since that would interfere with my library classes. Students bring their books to swap on the Monday and Tuesday just before the swap and I give them a ticket for each book they bring. The first year I carefully checked each book as it was brought in and would not give any tickets for books that did not fit the guidelines. I didn’t have too many, but the disappointed faces I saw were too much for me. I now don’t worry about subject matter or condition of the book; I just give them a ticket for each book. The reason I don’t mention subject matter or condition is because I don’t want any student to feel hurt or upset. Later, I weed out any inappropriate books and quietly dispose of the few that may show up. I have extra books that I put in the swap which help make up the difference. I print out tickets as needed so I don’t waste paper. You can easily make your own ticket.

I put twelve tickets on one sheet of paper and cut off the amount a student needs. Students are responsible for their own tickets and if they lose them, that is unfortunate. I recommend they keep them in their desks or lockers so they will be here for the swap.

Only students with tickets are allowed into the swap until after the lunch period is over. Then, any student may come through and ‘buy’ books either with a ticket or for the nominal price of 10 cents each. Money goes to the library. After the school day is over, any books left over belong to the library for me to do with what I want.

On the day of the swap, I let the older students come through first. I learned this reading about another swap at a school. That school’s first swap had the younger students coming through and choosing thick novels that were appropriate for the older students and by the time the older kids came to the swap, only younger picture books were left. They changed the order the next year and their swap went much better.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I hope you decide to have a book swap and that it is fun for you and your students.

Have a great week.
Audrey