November 2013 newsletter

September newsletter

Digital Trends article from Education Week

There are three things I took away from about this article from Education Week: "Digital Trends Shifting the Role of Teachers" (May 22, 2013):

1. The teacher is a facilitator, which has always been my goal, at least in lessons not involving reading a book aloud to students.
2. Using digital tools and innovative ideas can create an environment where students are not only responsible for their learning, but where they become the teacher in certain situations.
3. Teachers who are effective are continually learning and growing.  They are willing to try new things: a new environment, a new tool, a new method, then evaluate it and keep on thinking about new ways to teach their students.

Key quotes:

"There's so much you can now do to innovate and adapt. It almost becomes addictive," [Mr. Merkert] said, with a smile. "I'm more enthused and involved than I've ever been. I can only hope that enthusiasm translates to my students." 

The road was bumpy at first, Ms. Throckmorton admits. She started out by trying to focus too much on the technology itself and not enough on the content. But after growing frustrated, she decided to simply plan her lessons the way she always had, and used the technology as an additional layer, or tool, to advance it. 

"The biggest shift has to happen in teaching. It's a pedagogy shift that teachers will have to undergo, from teacher-centered to student-centered, and it's pretty incredible what we're seeing so far," said Mr. Anderson, who has worked in the district for the past decade. 

"Teacher-centered to student-centered" is also a key element of the new (in 2013-14) Washington State Teacher Evaluation System, focusing on the teacher as facilitator.  Not only is the "flipped classroom" a system that allows students to take control of their own learning and use classroom time effectively, it is a strategy that reflects well on a teacher who can set up and manage such a system where students can be successful.

I will spend my summer thinking about what this might look like in the library.  I can make videos that students can watch in the computer lab, then show their learning through formative assessments and activities.  I can create book trailers, and then have students create their own trailers to share with each other.  I know that for this to work, a management system has to be in place which has clear expectations and procedures.  I will be observing some fellow librarians over the next week and formulating some new ideas for procedures, I am certain.  I will be keeping this article in mind as I set up those expectations.

This Week in the Library

I am heading off to 6th grade camp next week Tuesday through Friday, so I spent some time preparing for our team building and orienteering courses that I'm helping to lead.  In addition to that, we had our old graphite iMacs in our computer lab replaced with the staff MacBooks that are three years old but still functioning.  Anything has to be better than the 13-14 year old iMacs!  Much of my week was spent preparing for that switchover and then putting signs up and teaching classes about the differences.  I look at this as a chance to reteach lab expectations and to instill new pride in our newer-looking lab.    The difference is amazing!

I decided to read fun books that didn't take a lot of thought this week to Kindergarten and 1st grade.  I just love "Cat Secrets" and "Oink-a-Doodle-Moo" by Jef Czekaj (pronounced "check-eye" - I had to look it up so I could tell the kids!).  The Kindergarteners loved pretending to be cats, no surprise there.  I started to explain the "Telephone" game to them for "Oink-a-Doodle-Moo", but believe it or not, most of them knew it already, though some looked confused when I asked them if they had a telephone at their house.

In 6th grade we continued some internet safety classes, talking about spam and phishing and a few other things related to email.  I had fun showing them some of the spam in my Gmail account originating from "Nigeria."

I like to read "Hooray for Diffendoofer Day" during the MSP state testing, so I pulled that one out for 3rd and 4th grade this week. 

I tried to order some caterpillars to show off in the library, since 2nd grade is studying butterflies and has their own caterpillars, but something happened to them on the way and they arrived motionless and covered in their own frass (look that one up if you dare!).  So they are sending new ones.  In the meantime we have been watching the Reading Rainbow called "Bugs" and reading "Insects Are My Life" by Megan McDonald.  One of my 2nd grade boys made the connection that she is also the author of the Judy Moody and Stink books, which you think I would have noticed years ago.  Luckily the students are paying more attention than I am.

Off to camp next week, bringing good scary story collections for the counselors to read to the kids, the iPad to help us identify leaves, and cameras to record the whole thing.

Lab before:

Curriculum and Common Core State Standards

I have been reviewing my library benchmarks in anticipation of studying and revising them based on Common Core State Standards.  I'm happy with them, but I have to remind myself that I need to revisit these regularly.

Tracking seven different grade levels and whether they have achieved my expectations for a school year is not easy.  My teaching is not always a spiral, or thematic, or a progression from one skill to a slightly more difficult skill.  Lessons can change weekly depending on current units being taught in the class, outside events such as field trips, collaboration with a teacher, or requirements from the district.  Making sure I meet each of my own expectations is an ongoing process.

I struggle with the balance between my own curriculum that I want to teach, often in less than thirty lessons a year per grade, once testing and activities and vacations impact teaching time, and supporting teachers and students.  I think that I have a reputation of dropping my curriculum in place of helping students choose biographies or learn how to a bibliography, or any other way I can support classroom teachers and their students.  I am glad I am known for this and I like that people feel they can come to me for help.  However I sometimes interrupt my own units or plans to provide this support.  How do we find that balance within our limited teaching time?  I'm still not sure and there probably isn't an answer.

• Ridgecrest Library Standards/Understandings/Benchmarks
• Ridgecrest Simple Library Curriculum Standards/Understandings

Washington Children's Choice voting this week!

All K-3 classes are reviewing the twenty picture books we read for the Washington Children's Choice Picture Book Award, and students are voting using a Google Form while they are finding and checking out books.  It works well for 1st through 3rd grade, though Kindergarten voting is still done with a token to mark their choice.

I will tally up the votes and mail them off to the WLMA WCCPBA committee today, where they will be added to 100,000 other votes from around the state.  We should know the winner within a couple of weeks!  My prediction is Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes or Snow Dog's Journey from my students' reactions.

In 4th grade we are continuing to talk about the importance of reading in our lives.  This week we focused on how to find books that interest us in the nonfiction section by doing a quick survey of the subjects in the nonfiction section.

Students looked at titles within each hundred (000-099, 100-199, etc.) and inferred some subtopics included in that category.  I am entering them all into Wordle by group and we will continue the exercise next week.  In small groups, students will examine the most common topics and find ones they are interested in pursuing.  We will also discuss the "weird" things they found and questioned me about, including:

• "Why are graphic novels, poetry, fairytales and folktales in nonfiction?"
• "What does "Generalities" mean for the 000-099 range?"  
• "Why are biographies in 92 and collective biographies in 920?"

Here is the first Wordle word cloud for the 000-099 range, created from subjects the students found themselves:

Book Fair

The Ridgecrest Library held its semi-annual Book Fair from Wednesday, March 6th through Friday, March 8th.  It was a success in terms of getting books into kids' hands and raising money for the library program.  We gave away over $100 in books to students who needed them, which always feels like a huge win.  The library will receive $1600 in cash to purchase new books, and I was able to select $1300 in Scholastic-published books from the book fair, both for the library's collection and to give away as part of our popcorn book giveaway once a month.

Students are always excited about having the book fair in the library, and I am grateful for the support that our families and community show for reading and the library.  I'm always a little torn, because it does take over the library for a week and make it difficult to do regular business.  Trying to do a thought-provoking lesson or read a serious book is not something to plan for Book Fair week.

I also, in all honesty, have trouble using library teaching time to promote selling anything to students, and using that valuable time to raise money for the library program.  I think that if any other classroom teacher was asked to put their curriculum on hold for a week to raise money to buy their textbooks and paper and classroom library books, there would be an outcry and an outright refusal.  I wish that a book fair could be an optional thing and that adequate budgets were provided to all our school libraries.  Inequity between programs and budgets is the single biggest issue we face as school librarians, I believe.  Students who don't have access to many books at home or public libraries often are those in schools with lower budgets in their library.  The gap between libraries with budgets and those without can be thousands of dollars, which translates to hundreds of fewer books being purchased each year.

In addition, schools with financially struggling families will not benefit as much from a book fair, solely because their families are choosing between putting food on the table and medical care, or gas for their car to get to school and work.  Buying a book for their children is often not going to be at the top of their list, so their students do not have as many books at home and their library does not earn as much from the book fair to put more books on the library shelves.  The gap widens more.

I am very lucky that I feel well-supported both by our building budget and by our PTA, plus we have opportunities to apply for grants from our wonderful Shoreline Public Schools Foundation every year.  However, even with these sources of funding, I find it a struggle to buy enough books to support the curriculum, such as the new science curriculum this year and the upcoming new social studies curriculum, not to mention a new reading curriculum with an emphasis on nonfiction with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards.  A new nonfiction hardcover book will cost more than $20, with cataloging, sales tax, and shipping included.  To purchase one new hardcover book for each students would be a cost of over $10,000 (500 students x $20).  My budget, including grants and book fair money, is less than half that amount, and I still have to buy fiction and everybody books to support reading for pleasure and in-class expectations for fiction.

I want to provide as many books as I can that students will want to read and teachers will find useful in their classrooms, while staying within a budget that allows me to spend approximately $10 per student. This tightrope is one I walk every year, deciding how to best spend my funds to support everyone and make this library functional and attractive and available to all readers and staff.  How someone does this without a healthy budget is beyond me, and I wish that my library program did not have to shut down two weeks a year to help provide those funds for our program.  Two weeks out of 36 weeks may not seem like a lot of time, but it really means two classes out of thirty-six total library sessions each year.  When I describe myself and my job as a teacher-librarian, I do not include the fundraiser part of my job, because the teaching is the core of why I am a teacher-librarian.

Caldecott and Newbery Awards 2013

It was time for, as one teacher friend put it, the Oscars for librarians this morning, with the webcast of the American Library Association Youth Media Awards live from the ALA Midwinter conference in Seattle, of all places!

The last few years I have put the webcast up on the TV (donated by our lovely PTA) and watched, whether there was a class in the library or not.  Today the 58 5th graders arrived for checkout partway through the webcast, but before the Caldecott and Newbery Awards were revealed.  It was a lot of fun to have some students standing around watching with me as the winners were announced.  At one point one of my 5th grade boys was oohing and aahing with every book announced just like me, as his teachers were laughing at us cheering in stereo.

For once in my librarian career, I had highly recommended the book that won the Newbery, The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate, as a read-aloud to several teachers who took me up on my suggestion.  At least three classes read it aloud at the beginning of the school year, and students loved it.  They learned all about Ivan and his life at the Tacoma shopping mall, then at the Atlanta Zoo.  We watched excerpts from National Geographic's special about urban gorillas, which showed how very small and concrete Ivan's enclosure was at the shopping mall.

I quote the first chapter to anyone who will listen.

I am Ivan.  I am a gorilla.  It's not as easy as it looks.

I am also a huge fan of Jon Klassen, the author and illustrator of This is Not My Hat, the 2013 Caldecott winner.  Last spring I read I Want My Hat Back to every 2nd-6th grade class, and laughed out loud every time myself.  It was a fabulous text for inference, and the reaction of each class to the end of the book was priceless to watch and listen to.  I highly recommend reading his books to intermediate classes for the reactions alone.

Congratulations to all the winners of the Youth Media Awards, I look forward to reading and sharing all of the titles with my students!

Motivation to Read

I am pleased with my schedule this year, mostly because it groups similar grades together for their library classes, so I feel that I am less scattered and more able to teach consistently across grade levels.  I also have larger blocks of time to really dig into my planning and put together lessons and units without a lot of interruptions.

One theme I have been working on is related to the importance of reading in life.  I administered a survey near the beginning of the year to the 4th and 5th grade students, measuring their perception of themselves as readers and how much they value reading itself.  I started with questions from the Motivation to Read Profile and then added some of my own to create my own survey and find out more about students' interests and ideas about reading.

After the survey I was concerned to find a large percentage of 4th graders did not have a high opinion of reading.  I feel that this is something I can teach, as I understand that students may not like to read and may not choose to do it independently when they have free time, but I think they need to understand the importance of reading in our lives.  So I have been working on some subtle lessons to cover this idea.  

I do not want to push students even farther away from reading by hitting them over the head with this idea during their library time, so I have been reading some stories with this topic, such as Miss Brooks Loves Books (and I Don't!) by Barbara Bottner.  This worked successfully this week with a 4th grade class with a large number of students who scored low results on the survey.  In the book, a student does not like to read and does not understand her librarian, who loves books.  The librarian dresses up in costumes and obviously loves to read and loves to encourage children to read.  The student despairs of ever finding a book that she will love, especially because she is given an assignment to share a book with the class and explain why she likes it, which seems to be an impossible task.  Finally, after many tries, the librarian hands her Shrek by William Steig, and the ugly, warty ogre captures her heart.

After I read Miss Brooks, this class begged me to read Shrek aloud, so I pulled it off the shelf and read it immediately.  They were surprised that it is different than the movie, but mostly they seemed to take to heart that everyone might just have a favorite book out there somewhere among the 10,000 we have in our library.  We just have to find it.  It might be ugly, rude and disgusting, but it will be someone's favorite.

We will continue to talk about favorite books and why reading is so important in our lives as the weeks go on.  I hope to measure a positive change in students' attitudes toward reading and their own self-concept of their reading when I administer the survey again in the spring.

Post Holiday Catching Up

Being out for two weeks for vacation always turns into at least four weeks before I am back up to speed in the library.  These breaks are hard on students, trying to get back into the flow of school, but it is difficult for adults, too.

We are reading the Washington Children's Choice Picture Book nominees in every K-3 library class, which means reading the same 20 titles to all 11 classes.  I enjoy most of them, but even the best book loses its luster after 5 or 6 readings in a couple of days.  So I tend to mix it up, reading two at a time to each class, but choosing new ones part way through the week.  This usually ends up with me getting confused and trying to read books more than once, or I forget to read some to a class and we have to read four the last day before we vote for our favorites.  I think the confusion adds to the fun, myself.

Favorite WCCPBA books so far:

Prudence Wants a Pet by Cathleen Daly, illustrated by Stephen Michael King - a story about a girl who wants a pet so badly that she will take anything she can get, including a stick, a twig, a shoe, or an old car tire.  Prudence doesn't care what the neighbors think, she just desperately wants a pet.  I enjoy the dry humor in this book (which escapes the kindergarteners completely, but as long as I crack myself up, that makes it fun!) and the main character's persistence.

The Sunflower Sword by Mark Sperring, illustrated by Miriam Latimer - I thought this was going to be a simple boy-wants-to-be-a-knight story, purely from the cover illustration of a boy with a colander on his head as a helmet.  But the language is wonderful, with lots of alliteration, and the sentiment that you can turn a friend into an enemy through a simple gesture is a nice illustration of what we call the "Ridgecrest Way" - being responsible, respectful, kind and safe.  It is a touching story that resonates with students, if they don't get distracted by the heart-shaped dragon tail on one page!

Chicken Big written and illustrated by Keith Graves - I am not one for doing voices while reading, but the five chickens in this story just beg to have silly voices attached to them, so I'm doing my best.  A humongous chick is born one day and immediately confuses his coop-mates.  They have no idea that he is a chicken like them, mainly because of his size.  Yet they just have to classify him, so using the little evidence their little bird brains can gather, they come up with crazier and crazier explanations of what this chick really is - an elephant?  a squirrel?  The chick gets more and more confused, but continues to help his friends out despite their obtuseness.   This is a really fun book to read out loud, and, to the confusion of some students, it has led to me randomly saying, "Indoor elephants are dangerous!" with much glee.