No Shhing Here

One more week and then it's back to school in New York State. I'm sitting in the lobby of my junior high pushing agendas and sketch pads from the school store during 8th Grade Orientation, so it's the perfect time to blog about setting the tone for a new year.   What is tone? It's the mood, attitude and atmosphere of a place and program. When it comes to the tone of my library, here's what I'm trying to convey: Inclusiveness - the library is a place for everyone. We're a safe, comforting, welcoming and accepting environment.  Creativity - this is a creative environment where you can explore and develop projects and ideas. Respect - I expect respect to go both ways in the library.  Information hub - it's one stop shopping for books, magazines, Internet resources, etc. If you're a student or teacher have questions, we've got answers. Academic success - to be a successful student or teacher you need the library and it's resources. ...

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...

Better late than never, right? For May, our book displays celebrated National Bike Month. If your school sponsors a "bike to school" day, this kind of showcase is a great way to promote it. Because I was late taking photos this month, certain parts of our display are looking a little weary. Not everything we come up with is a home run - check out our sad "bike tires" - repurposed trufella tree trunks. Though, the bike was a hit - kids loved ringing the bell on the handle bars. Eventually we scraped the "tires" and just moved the signs to the columns on either side of the desk. We used tricycles and scooter type toys on the display shelves, along with Fourth of July table decorations. We used the theme to display books that in some way deal with wheels, including NASCAR, skateboarding, and cards. We REALLY wanted to include a couple of stationary bikes, so kids could pedal as they read, but we couldn't find any, so we scrapped that id...

Over the weekend, I presented at the 2012 NYLA/SSL conference . It's New York's state level school librarian conference. I got to listen to some great speakers, including Joyce Valenza and David Wiesner. I presented with my librarian co-worker (and neighbor), Leslie, on using apps for instructional purposes - our workshop title was App-ealing Instructional Practices - aren't we creative? :) At the presentation, we handed out bookmarks featuring the apps we used. Here's Leslie's suggestions for elementary apps:  And here are my suggestions for secondary apps. If you follow my blog, many of these probably sound familiar.  I've covered Doodle Buddy, Index Card and Book Creator in this post , Explain Everything in this post , SimpleMind+ for note taking , and Evernote as part of our listening skills unit . Also, I did a guest post for the SLJ blog Touch and Go . I talk about applications for many of the above apps - check it out here. Do you have a ...

Are you sick of hearing about note taking yet? If so, you're not alone - our students are right there with you. We've finally wrapped up our study skills unit, and had the kids take a survey to assess the experience. We needed to know what was successful and what was unsuccessful. So we asked. When you ask a 9th grader to list the ways in which you bombed as a teacher, be prepared, 'cause they aren't afraid to tell you exactly what they think. Here are a few of my favorite gems from their survey: "The entire system of SimpleMind [a concept mapping app] was, in my opinion, superfluous at best, and a waste of technological resources and time." "...Grading the cornell notes on a RUBRIC is RIDICULOUS...I found that totally ridiculous, stupid, and unnecessary. like seriously, who grades notes?" "Most students simply don't like doing the extra work that goes into study skills, so even though you taught us the information we will probably...

During the school year, I've chronicles my efforts to teach study skills to 150 AP World History students. At some points, note taking was kind of like eating brussel sprouts , and but we improved from there . This week, we switched gears a little bit to talk about listening skills. Specifically, we focused on 8 habits of bad listeners and how to ID the important stuff in a lecture. Bad habits we covered included:   We also talked about signal words - cues and clues that help the listener understand where they are in a lecture. Following my 20 minute mini-lesson, the teacher delivered a lecture on Chinese dynasties. This was the FIRST TIME most students had ever taken notes purely from listening, without the help of a cloze or fill-in-the-blank activity (What's up with getting to April of your 9th grade year without taking lecture notes?!? Why did we phase that out - it's such a great critical thinking/listening activity?!?). To help s...