No Shhing Here

Who doesn't love summer vacation? It means my mornings can start like this: And my afternoons can look like this: Summer vacation is essential for fostering healthy, happy teachers. It's a much needed opportunity to relax, recharge, and reevaluate. Some of my best ideas are generated over summer vacation when my brain has a chance to truly wonder - and I actually have time to follow those tangents. Summer vacation also is a perfect opportunity for Professional Development. I co-hosted a fantastic workshop yesterday presented by the YA nonfiction author Marc Aronson and library system director Sue Bartle. It was an awesome immersion into the Common Core and informational texts. Can't wait to share all of their great insight and ideas with you! If you're on summer vacation, I hope you're enjoying it!

The end of the year means circulation statistics. Image from here. This time around, I've delved deeper into specifics, and I think I know a lot more about my user population and their reading habits. This week I learned the following: Ninth grade boys don't very read much. I didn't realize that their circulation numbers were so abysmal compared to everyone else until I broke it down this spring. I **think** it's because most of my 9th grader ELA teachers don't require classroom novels, and fifteen year old boys just aren't that anxious to read for fun. 8th graders and 9th graders read very different things. Books popular at the 8th level don't even break into the top ten at the 9th grade level. This could be because 8th graders are exploring titles that weren't available in the middle school library, while most 9th graders read these books the previous year. Blockbusters, like Hunger Games , are popular with EVERYONE. New books aren't al...