Tennessee Association of School Librarians Co-op

I am so excited to be heading to Tennessee this week with Tamara and Kristen for the Tennessee Association of School Librarians Co-op!  Karen, the TASL professional development chair, has been so gracious via email and I am looking forward to meeting her and networking with librarians during two days, one in Gatlinburg and the other in Medina.  As Karen explained, Tennessee is a long state, and they repeat their summer professional development so participants can choose the more convenient site.

I'll be presenting two solo sessions.  "The first, What's a PLN, and Why Do I Want One?" I first shared at SCASL in March.  My personal learning network is responsible for saving my sanity, expanding my practice, and helping me to at least find the learning curve.  In one year, a great network of library professionals on Twitter, in the blogosphere, and via our state professional organization have helped revive my practice, and have made me a more effective librarian, as well as a much nicer person to be around. 

The presentation is below.

What’s a PLN and Why Do I Want One

The other session I am presenting is "Sacred Cows - It's What's for Dinner!"  Inspired by many posts in the last year by librarians I admire who are questioning the practices that have led to our shushing stereotype, I'll reflect on our policies, procedures, and practices to determine whether they support our learning community goals, or just keep us in control of the herd. This was a fun session to create, and my partner-in-crime Tamara helped by putting together a Scoop-it topic.

Sacred Cows – It’s What’s for Dinner!

Tamara, Kristen and I will also be presenting together at the general session.  The topic is, "The Care and Feeding of Administrators."  We will post that presentation at a later date. 

I'm looking forward to a wonderful week of travel, presenting, and meeting new members of our PLN.  When I get back, it will be time to start reading the books for our first Book Boot Camp chat! 

I'm "Yapp"ing about #BookBootCamp

The seven South Carolina librarians who are putting together Middle Grade Book Boot Camp are gathering titles and getting our wiki together.  While doing that, I found an app via Librarians on the Fly that can keep all of our participants informed about the schedule, and provide a news feed via a Twitter hashtag. 

Yapp is a free online tool that allows you to create your own mobile app for important events that you want to share.  The design pages are easy to navigate.  Choose from several themes based on the type of activity you are promoting.  The app includes a homepage, invitation page, a page to include a schedule, a newsfeed for following a hashtag, and a gallery for photos that you want to share with the Yapp followers.  You can add extra pages to your app if you need them.  After you finish designing your app, you publish it and share it via a link or QR code.

This is great!  We have a year's worth of Twitter chats coming up, and we wanted to share the dates, the genres, the host for each chat, and the address for the wiki where the book lists are.  The newsfeed via our hashtag #bookbootcamp means that I don't miss any pertinent tweets. 

These are screenshots from my phone.  I downloaded the Yapp viewer, called Yappbox and entered the code of our Book Boot Camp Yapp.  

The schedule page has all of the dates for our chats.  If you click on the arrows pointing right you will see more details, including who is hosting the chat that month, their blog site, and a link to the wiki with a suggested reading list. 

 The News Feed follows your choice of Twitter hashtag. Most of our posts to the #bookbootcamp have been suggestions to each other of books we might want to add to our genre list, or to share a great title or list with other middle school librarians. 




If you need to edit your Yapp after you create it, that's easily done on the website.  When you publish it your followers get a prompt to update to the latest version.

If you want to follow our Middle Grade Book Boot camp via a Yapp, you can click on this link:

http://my.yapp.us/RTMQDS  or you can download the Yappbox app on your smartphone and enter the code: RTMQDS

Of course, the app lends itself really well for major events like weddings, graduations, and family reunions,  but I think it would be great to use it for promoting events in the library.  What about a Yapp for your library events this year?  What would you include?  

The 2013 Shelf Challenge

It was half way through April before I picked up the 2013 Shelf Challenge, issued by The Busy Librarian.  I had a block of time free up from a cancellation in the library schedule and I love a challenge!  It makes sense to me.   These are the books my students browse every day, shouldn't I know what is on the shelf, too?

The idea is simple.  Pick a section in your library and read the dust jackets and summaries from every book in the section throughout the month of April.  (If a picture book section, read the whole book.)  I chose to read the section of fiction where the S authors live, simply because it was suggested in reason number 4.  Those shelves face away from the teaching area of the library, and I noticed they were crowded.  I also couldn't remember adding any new books there recently except Gary D. Schmidt, Maggie Steifvater, and Rebecca Stead, so I wanted to see how old it was looking.

The Book Who Lost It's Cover Image?

The first book I picked up was The Boy Who Lost His Face, 1989 humor by Louis Sachar.   This book belongs at Awful Library Books, not on my shelves. There are water stains on it.  Who put it on the shelf with water stains?  Is it any wonder that no one has checked it out since before 2007?  I wanted to wash my hands after I picked it up!

I pulled a circulation report and found I had 40 books in the S authors that had not circulated since 2007 when we switched to Follett Destiny.  I took a deep breath and began the challenge again, in earnest.   I have allowed myself the option of skipping reading the summary of books I decide to weed, but so far have read them anyway. I'm glad I read Mrs. Yingling's post about the agony of weeding.  I know there is someone else out there making hard decisions about which of a beloved author's (Zilpha Keatley Snyder!) titles to keep. 

This is going to take more than a day, but I have the rest of April.  I'll let you know how I'm progressing. Why don't you take the challenge? You can join up here: 

Spring Reading Challenge

 This spring, I wanted to do a school-wide book promotion that could include everyone, avid and reluctant readers.  I found inspiration from this blog post by Might Librarian Tiff.  She chose ten categories and left a lot of room for free choice within those categories, such as read a book with green on the cover, or read a book written in 2012-13.  I was also inspired by this post by my friend the Eliterate Librarian, who created a reading challenge for her faculty based on The Hub's 2013 Reading Challenge. 

I loved Tiff's beautiful header, and she is glad to share what she creates, but I wanted to try creating my own.  You can see the results.  I think it's pretty.  I used Photoshop Elements and learned how to insert a shape and how to make a gradient line.  That's two new things!

To get the faculty involved, I printed signs that said Mrs. or Mr. NAME is reading.....  I used the pretty header and laminated them.  I gave all of our school staff members, including administration, teachers, and office staff, a copy of the reading challenge and the sign and asked them to participate by putting the sign outside of their door and using a dry erase marker to write the title of the book they are currently reading.  I also asked them to post their reading challenge to let their students in on their progress by adding titles.

It was great to see the teacher signs appear in the hall and to have students coming to the library to pick up a Reading Challenge Sheet. It has been especially fun to have them come in and ask for a book in a specific category.  To save a little browsing time, I set up a table with nothing but books published in 2012-2013, and "crowd-sourced" a list of books made into movies by sticking up piece of poster paper with a marker so students could add titles.  I'll make something pretty out that later. 

Yesterday was our last day before Spring Break, and several students and teachers came in looking for books for the challenge to read over the holidays. The best thing of all is that our students in LD/Resource are participating with their teacher.  They are excited about reading, and I'm excited that they are excited. Awesome!

I'm not sure what kind of celebration we will have, but I know it will be just before school gets out, held during the day (so students can miss class), and will involve food and door prizes.  That's all you need to keep a middle schooler happy!

Here's my Spring Reading Challenge.  I kept some of Tiff's categories, but added some of my own.  I need to get that blog onto my website at school pretty soon....

Spring Reading Challenge by Monique German

Sob Stories

image adapted from You Cry Alone by gwenboul via Flickr

What is it about a heart rending story that draws middle school girls? For some of my students, handing them that first Lurlene McDaniel book leads to a three-year trawl through the abyss of anguish, the depths of despair, the mire of melancholy, the….you get the idea.  This is a challenge for me because this genre is one that I avoid reading whenever possible. Tell me that a book made you cry and it immediately drops to the bottom of my “must read” list.  It’s not that I am not an empathetic person,  I just prefer to read about action and adventures, especially fantasy.  This is probably why I have a lot of success with boys who are reluctant readers, and not as much with the girls who are. On the other hand, I have enjoyed and recommended new titles such as Wonder, Out of My Mind, See You at Harry’s and One for the Murphys.  Maybe I’m getting more sentimental as I get older.  

I am creating a list of “sob stories” for my girls who are addicted to this emotionally manipulative genre.  Below are titles that I have in my library that are suitable for middle grade (6th - 8th) students. Some have been around a very long time, but are still popular.

Any title by Lurlene McDaniel

Defiance, Valerie Hobbs

Each Little Bird that Sings, Deborah Wiles

Edward’s Eyes, Patricia MacLachlan

Everything is Fine, Ann Dee Ellis

Hard Hit, Ann Turner

I Heart You, You Haunt Me, Lisa Schroeder

In a Heartbeat, Loretta Ellsworth

Jumping the Scratch, by Sarah Weeks

Life on the Refrigerator Door, Alice Kuipers

Mockingbird (mok’ing-bûrd)

Olive’s Ocean, Kevin Henkes

One for the Murphys, Lynda Mullay Hunt

Out of My Mind, Sharon Draper

Phoenix Rising, Karen Hesse

Pieces of Georgia, Jennifer Bryant

See You at Harry’s,  Johanna Knowles

Silhouetted by the Blue, Traci L. Jones

So B It, by Sarah Weeks

Swear to Howdy, Wendelin Van Draanen

Tears of a Tiger, Sharon Draper

Tending to Grace, Kimberly Newton Fusco

The Truth About Forever, Sarah Dessen

Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher

Wenny Has Wings, Janet Lee Carey

Wonder, R. J. Palacio

I’m sure I am missing some. What would you add to the list?


Addition to this post:  I set up the above display with tissue boxes.  The books flew off the shelf!  Kristen says add Ways to Live Forever to the list!
 

Thank you, Mr. Chew!

The first of a three part-movie series based on The Hobbit, will be released on Friday, December 14.  The movie is brought to us by the same creative team that produced The Lord of the Rings, and I am looking forward to a wonderful movie experience, but I am also feeling a little anxious. I have seen some movies that just did not do justice to the novels they were based on, and The Hobbit is my all-time favorite novel.   I have probably read it 20 times since I was in the seventh grade.  In seventh grade, my English teacher read it out loud to me.

This is my SECOND copy.  I read the covers off of the first one.

I was an Air Force brat in Nellingen, Germany in 1971 during the last semester of 7^th grade.  We had a long commute to Stuttgart Junior High School each day, and I don’t have fond memories of my classes.  In fact, I don’t remember any of the classes at all, except for Mr. Chew’s English class.  I remember Mr. Chew as being very tall, with dark hair and big, bushy eyebrows. I don’t remember whether he was a good English teacher, but I do remember his voice:  a deep, basso profundo that he could modulate to fit the setting, mood, and characters of the books he read aloud to us.  

I loved Fridays.  We would start class with a spelling test, and then Mr. Chew would read to us for the rest of the period.  He poured character into his reading, with dramatic rises of pitch and deep, quiet whispers of dread.  It gave me the shivers. When The Lord of the Rings movie series was released, I was astonished to hear Gollum speak in the voice of Mr. Chew!  He captured the light-hearted early start of the book, and gradually shifted the mood of his readings to fit the change in tone in the book, as the hobbit and his dwarvish companions came closer to the final, desperate battle for the Lonely Mountain.  

Do you read to your students?  Forty-two years later, when I read The Hobbit, I still hear the voice of a man whom I only knew for one semester.  I hear the echoes of his love of fantasy and science fiction whenever I pick up the latest Rick Riordan book, and I know that his dedication to reading left an indelible impression on a twelve year old girl.  

In Mr. Chew’s honor, I’m inviting my students to come listen to me read The Hobbit during sixth grade lunches this week, and have planned a book club meeting for the day before the movie is released.   I hope I am able to communicate how much I love this story, and maybe encourage some new fans.    If anyone out there knows a former English teacher named Mr. Chew, tell him “Thank you,” for me!

Five Reasons I Am Ready for School to Start

5.  Relaxing, renewing summer – This summer was spent reading, relaxing, and traveling with my favorite people; my husband, my children, and my mom.  I took on no major household projects like painting or redecorating.  I stretched my body in the garden weeding and harvesting, and I stretched my mind with reading.  I made a quilt, talked my mom into quilting it, and hung it on the library wall.

4.   Reading, reading, reading -  I won’t go into the exact numbers, but due to several incentives, mentioned in this post, I have read more middle grade and young adult literature titles this summer than in the entire previous calendar year.  I have a list of must-reads for my students and teachers, and thanks to NetGalley, I have some titles to watch out for that I can promote before I even buy them!

3.       Inspiring staff development –  My summer had barely started before I attended the two-day Upstate Technology Conference, where I networked with other librarians and gathered great information about new educational technologies, Web 2.0 tools, and current trends.  During three days of Mentor training I learned so much about how to talk to people in ways that are non-threatening, and how to offer help without offering unwanted advice.  Although I don’t have a new teacher assigned to me this year, I know that the training I received will help me build relationships with the new teachers in our building.  A full-day SMARTNotebook 11 training reminded me of the versatility of the interactive whiteboards we have in our district, and I am excited about sharing the new features with our staff.

2.       My PLN – This was the summer of the PLN, a time when I really understood how important it is to never stop learning, to reach way beyond my own knowledge, and to tap into others’ energy, creativity, and inspiration.  Starting with the other two middle school librarians in my district, and expanding to other states and other countries, I have been able to remind myself of why I became a librarian, and to begin to let go of excuses that kept me from being an effective one.

1.       THE STUDENTS! – It’s still all about them.  The year I don’t look forward to seeing my students at the beginning of the school year is the year I should retire.  No, actually, I should retire BEFORE it gets to that point.  Middle school students are so diverse in their interests, maturity levels, and personalities that it is almost impossible to make a blanket statement about them.  Whatever they are, middle school students appeal to my heart in ways that elementary and high school students do not. I like their sense of humor, their unpredictability, and their sassiness.  I know everyone does not feel that way, and I believe that only people who like middle school students should teach middle school students. 

What about you?  What is the best part of starting a new school year, and what prepares you during the summer to get off to a great start?

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