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

New Books

Greetings!

Some of you have been asking for new books. I have three to share with you today that we are using for our Sunflower Award. I am partnering with our seventh and eighth grade language arts teacher who is giving advanced reading credit to any and all students who read a minimum of twelve of our Sunflower books. These three are all published in 2016, so they are quite new and most likely your students will not have read them. Although we are saving them for the seventh and eighth graders, you will likely have students in the fifth and sixth grades that will enjoy them, as well.


Kid Owner by Tim Green
Take Ryan, 12-year-old boy who wants to play middle school football, add in a mother who does not want her son to play football. Then add in a father that Ryan never knew who unexpectedly dies and leaves to Ryan the Dallas Cowboys football team. Of course, Ryan is thrilled beyond belief, but owning the Cowboys does not bring him friendship. He now has many more complicated problems to deal with and then to top it off, he must deal with a jealous stepmother and half-brother he knew nothing about. His stepmother wants her son to have the Cowboys and is working the legal system to get this inheritance changed. What will happen to Ryan? Will he remain the ‘kid owner’ or will the football team be taken from him?


A Bandit’s Tale: The Muddled Misadventures of a Pickpocket by Deborah Hopkinson
Rocco, an 11-year-old boy, is sold by his parents to a *padrone and brought to the United States from Italy to work in the streets. His family believes the padrone is honorable man and do not realize that Rocco must entertain people in the streets trying to earn money. The padrone takes the money and if Rocco and the other boys do not bring in at least a dollar a day, they are beaten, starved, and punished in other ways. Rocco meets a pickpocket and thinks that he would be better off if he begins to include this new method of earning money. Is Rocco a poor boy sold to a villain or is he a scoundrel who deserves what he gets?
This story by Deborah Hopkinson takes the reader back to nineteenth century New York where we learn what it was like to live back then. Child labor, immigration, animal cruelty are all topics that are addressed in this story.
*a contract labor system that many immigrants used to find employment in the United States.


Sweet Home Alaska by Carole Estby Dagg
Terpsichore loves Laura Ingalls Wilder books and wants to be a pioneer. Her chance comes when the family decide to move from Wisconsin to Alaska to be pioneers. Terpsichore is loving this new adventure and falls in love with Alaska. The only problem is her mother who is homesick for Wisconsin and polite society. Terpsichore hatches a plan to convince her mother that Alaska can be a wonderful, civilized home.
This story is based on Alaska’s real life Palmer Colony.

I will have more in a few weeks. I just need to get them read, first. Thank goodness I have some parents who help read them for me!

Have a great week!

Audrey

Motivating Reading

Greetings!

I have a real burden for encouraging children to read in their leisure time. I discovered I was really good at this when I first started teaching in a two teacher school in Tallahassee, FL. . I had seventeen students in grades 5 – 8. All my students could read, but only one or two really would read. I implemented three simple and easy things in my classroom and by the end of the year all but one student (who had learning differences) were reading well and enjoyed it. Over the four years I was there, parents and grandparents came to me and expressed their appreciation for helping their children learn to enjoy reading.

My three simple and easy things are simple and easy because they do not require any lesson plans, very little preparation, and students learn quickly to love reading which really makes them lifelong readers.

What are these simple and easy things? I have mentioned these in previous posts, but I also believe that it does not hurt to repeat them every now and then.

Simple Thing 1: I had a Sustained Silent Reading time every day. Call it what you like, but have it every day. Schedule it like your other classes. Do not treat it like a leftover activity that you’ll do if you have time. If you are running low on time, shorten your time for that day, but please do not skip it if at all possible. By putting it on the schedule, you are silently telling students that this is important. If you skip it regularly, you send the message that it is not very important. If it is not on the schedule, it can be easy to forget. (My ‘rules’ for the silent reading time are listed at the end of this email.)

In my classes, this time is silent and students and I are reading. Students get ready by getting enough books or reading material to have at their desks so they don’t have to get up and get more. If you allow students to get up to get more, they distract others and little reading is done. When you first start this, there will be some students who do not judge what they will need and do run out. I am reading my book, too, but I watch for these students out of the corner of my eye. I have done one of two things. I myself get up and give them a few books. I have also stopped my timer – I have to set a timer or I will not stop in time – allow the student to go get books, then I ask if everyone is ready to resume our reading time, and start the timer again. This helps students to realize that the time is important and students seldom run out of books the next time. I also ask before we begin, if everyone thinks they have enough for the reading time.

With my students in grades 5 – 8, I started this with just 10 minutes. After a couple of weeks, it was routine and we talked about adding another 5 minutes. We worked up to 20 minutes by the end of a month or so, and kept it there. With my 3rd graders, I started with 5 minutes and at the end of a week or two I added another 5 minutes, and we worked up to 20 minutes every day by the end of two months or so. Believe it or not, they loved it. Extra reading time was a prize they asked for and worked toward as a class. We had special Reading Days about once a month usually on a Friday morning. Students could bring a pillow or blanket and snuggle under their desks and we’d read for 30 minutes. Can you imagine your students asking for extra reading time? It can happen.

Simple Thing 2: I read aloud to them every day. I read for worship from a book, I read after lunch from another book, and I read in between times when it worked out. Now, I am a good oral reader. Not everyone is skilled at this. I understand, but children of all ages need to hear books ready by an accomplished reader. If you don’t feel comfortable with reading or don’t feel that you do it well, you can begin with listening as a classroom to books on tape read by professional readers. If you have an Audible subscription, you can get lots of books there. If you feel that you cannot afford this, it may be that some of your parents will purchase books on tape for the school. Check out your local public library and see what they have. Check out used bookstores. It may be that you find books on tape there, too.

Simple Thing 3: I took them to the library. At my school in Tallahassee, we did not have a large school library, so I piled some in my car and another parent piled some in her car – (that was so long ago, that we were not yet required to have seatbelts on every child!) and we drove the 3 miles to the public library. Every student got a library card and for the two students who did not live in town, I put their books on my card. We went every two weeks and they checked out books. This was difficult to arrange, but it showed yet again that books are important.

When I taught 3rd grade, we had a school library and students had a weekly library time. Teachers were not required to stay with the students, but I usually did. I helped them find books to read and I also checked out. I modeled the behavior I wanted them to have. I stood in line along with them to check out and read my books during our silent reading time. I checked out all kinds of books and when I had one that I thought the students would like I would be a little bit sneaky. I would read silently at my desk during our silent reading time and when I got to a funny part, I would giggle just a tiny bit, just loud enough for them to hear. They would look up at me, and I would silently shake with laughter with my hand over my mouth. They all knew that it was a silent time, but when the timer rang, they were bursting with questions. I would just laugh out loud and read a little bit of the book, and it never failed that a few of them wanted to read my book. I made them wait until we went to the library to check out again.

If you do not have the opportunity or time for regular field trips to the local public library and do not have a school library, then make sure your classroom library is good. Find books at used bookstores, Goodwill, thrift shops, garage sales, anywhere you can.

These three simple things really are three ways to emphasize one main idea. Reading is fun and is important for everyone.

My Silent Reading ‘Rules’
1. Everyone in the classroom reads for the specified time. This includes students, the teacher, student teachers, and visitors.
2. There is no talking during the time period so we do not distract others from reading.
3. Set a timer so I, the teacher, will not have to keep looking at the time.
4. Everyone reads self-selected books. I discourage magazines, because usually students will not actually read, but will instead flip through the pages and browse. This is a time for READING. Browsing can happen other times.
5. If you have younger students who cannot yet read, then have them get a basket or a pile of books to look through. They may need to have quite a few books – possibly 25 or more. By participating in the silent reading time, they are learning the procedure of choosing books and silently ‘reading’ for fun. Another option is to have the non-readers sit in the classroom library and be able to pull one book, then another during the reading time. Personally, I prefer them choosing a stack of books rather than sitting in the library. They are prepared for the ‘silent reading class if they have their basket or stack of books just like the older students.

I would encourage you to find 10 – 15 minutes a day to implement a silent reading time. Try it for a year and see how much your students’ progress.

Have a great week!

Audrey

Currently reading:
Betsy’s Wedding by Maud Hart Lovelace
Somewhere Safe with Somebody Good by Jan Karon
Kid Owner by Tim Green
Country Living by Ellen G. White

Sunflower 2016 Winner

Hello,
I mentioned our Sunflower Award earlier in the school year and gave a list of book titles we are reading for this. Our winner for 2016 is:

The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. (2015)

Ada was born with a club foot. Her mother is ashamed of her twisted foot and does not let Ada out of the apartment, so for ten years, Ada has been stuck there. War comes and the British children are being sent to the country to be safe. Ada’s younger brother Jamie is to go to the train station. Ada knows that her life is bad enough now with a mother who treats her cruelly, and without her brother, it will be worse, so she sneaks out and joins him. They are placed with Susan who does not seem to want them, but she does her duty to feed and clothe them and take care of them. Ada sees a pony in the pasture and learns to ride, so finally she is able to move like the wind rather than crawl around. Over time the children and Susan bond and learn to love each other.
Parts of this story are difficult to read since the children’s mother is really very cruel to Ada. Ada’s resourcefulness and grit help her get through it and the story ends well for the children.

This book won a Newbery Honor this year along with other awards and is a New York Times bestseller.

Our runner up came in very close, just a couple of votes between the two. I actually did not get a change to read it myself, but my adult reader loved it and a couple of my student readers were having difficulty choosing between it and our winner.

The runner up is:
Diary of A Waitress: the Not-so-Glamorous Life of a Harvey Girl by Carolyn Meyer

Years ago Judy Garland was in a movie about The Harvey Girls and told the story of young girls who helped settle the West by working in Harvey Restaurants along the railroads. You may have seen this movie at some point. This is another story of a girl who decided to become a Harvey girl. It is a view of a historical part of our country that we hear little about. I kept trying to read it, but both copies of our book were out for the students to read. Now, I can finally get a copy again and finish the book!

Have a great week.

Audrey

Currently Reading:
I, Q: The White House by Roland Smith
The Last Boy at St. Edith’s by Lee Gjertsen Malone
The Centurion’s Wife by Davis Bunn and Janette Oke
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (Audible)
The Intrusion of Jimmy by P. G. Wodehouse
The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell (Audible)
It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas