Today, the end

So now it's 4pm and I've shut out the lights and locked up (since we have all that book fair merch).

The classes went well.  We had a few more preview classes.  There was an overlap in which a K class was not quite finished previewing (and being loud) while I was still finishing up my second Specials class and they wanted to check out.  Had to stall for a few minutes before I could give the 3rd graders directions while the noisy K kids were hustled out.

In my Specials classes, I've been reading them a GA Children's Book Award Nominee every week, then going on with an unrelated lesson.  I have a librarian friend who makes a killer website every year about the nominees and even includes some self-made read-aloud videos.  (He got me to read Moonshot this year.)  Then I usually do something with a Scholastic News article or something with one of the paid databases on the county's research site.

But this week I just wanted to share the inspiration from the Caine's Arcade site.  I'm sure you've heard of this kid.  Last year he spent the summer creating his own cardboard box arcade in his Dad's auto part shop. A customer made a short film of it that went viral.

Now there's a second film and the kick of to a foundation based on fostering the creativity of kids.  So I showed my groups both videos this week and we talked about ideas for getting involved.  We'll see if anything come of it.  They were especially knocked out by the appearance of Jack Black and the Chief Engineer of the Mars Curiosity Rover.

The cool thing was, the two books I'd set aside for this rotation's reading weeks ago fit the theme perfectly!  Dave the Potter  is about a slave who was a potter and made stuff.  When A Dragon Moves In is about using your imagination.  So connecting them to Caine's Arcade was easy and fun.

Then I helped the counselor print out some stuff for her bulletin board.  I remembered to play that Johnny Appleseed movie right a t 2!  I rang up a couple after school sales to teachers and put some more stuff on hold for them.  I ran the dismissal slides for bus call.  I introduced the new ESOL teacher to Language Masters and taught her to download and use Audacity so she can use it to record students reading aloud, then they can hear themselves and work on their fluency.

How was your day?

Have a great weekend everybody!

Today, Part Deux

Things I could write rants about but will try to refrain from:

The new Mimio shipment and the screwups that has entailed.
The myriad problems with taking checks at the book fair.
The problems with checking out cameras to staff.

So it's about 11 now and I had to spend most of the last hour on those Mimios doing a job that should have been done before we ever received them, but I'll let that one go for now.  I also had a class in here first thing this morning on the computers.  Some of them had gotten new headphones and left their trash on the floor.  Silly kids, your names were written on the packaging.  I took them down to their class, gave the pile to the teacher and told her about the name thing.  She had a sparkly laugh as she was about to tear into them.  Heh heh.

Helped a staff member with a camera.  Helped the new ESOL teacher who just got a student who speaks NO English.  She had a panicked look on her face, but when I taught ESOL I found those to be the most rewarding students. I pointed her to this, a great resource: Help! They Don't Speak English!

Now it's really 11 and the clerk has to go to lunch duty so I'll be alone with a K class preview.  The horror!

Actually, that class was great.  They were 1st grade and she's one of the recent Teacher of the Year winners--and for good reason.  They were well prepared and acted accordingly.  Made life so much easier.

So now, a brief reprieve while I gulp down lunch, check email and prepare for my two upcoming Specials Classes.  5th grade, then 3rd grade.  I set up an area in a corner with a projector cart and a portable screen since the book fair is taking up the whole middle of the Media Center.  They'll sit on the floor and we'll do a light lesson this (and next) week.

More later...

Today In the Library

You comment, you get your wish.

Ms. Yingling comments: "I'd find it interesting to see what the daily operations of your library are, but that's just me!"

I got here today at 7am.  I don't know why, since I didn't sleep particularly well.  The thing about today, is it's unusual because it's a Book Fair day.  But then are there ever any "normal" days in a school library?

Already this morning I've talked to a 3rd grade teacher about a laminating matter.  I had to bust her chops last year because she really goes crazy on the laminating.  I've hardly seen her this year and this morning she admitted she'd bought her own small laminator.  "It's expensive," she complained.  Welcome to my world.  She had a game with game pieces she's been reluctant to do on her own and is also reluctant to ask the media clerk because, in the teacher's opinion, the clerk rushes and will overlap many of the little game pieces.

Those little game pieces teachers give us are a pain in the butt.  It's much better, as the person running the machine, to have it laminated first, then have them cut out the pieces.  But then, of course, the laminating doesn't hold together well.

I got the book keeper to move the laminating film cost to the "Instructional Supplies" line in the school budget this year  instead of "Media Supplies," so that's a relief.

Then I had a 1st grade teacher in here with a video she wants me to play at 2:00 on the closed circuit system for all of 1st grade to watch at the same time.  I set an alarm on my phone and told her to make sure to tell the other teachers to have their stuff up and ready and on Channel 4 at 2:00.  Last time I did this a kid came in 15 minutes after the thing had been playing wanting me to start it over because their teacher had it on the wrong channel.

8:00 - Clerk just got here.  We were discussing book fair sales from last night's PTA event and she's getting ready to change into the Clifford the Big Red Dog costume to greet students as they come in this morning for the official kick off of the book fair.

A teacher just brought in ANOTHER damaged CD/cassette player.  It's been like a boom box holocaust around here lately.  It's the 26th unit this year!  I hope all these tech writers are right about us all having tablets or whatever soon so teachers can just have mp3s to play instead of physical tapes and such.

8:20 - Bell just rang to let students in.  The assistant PE coach just came in to ask about borrowing a projector cart and portable screen for next week.  She's going to set up her Wii and four remotes and the whole class is going to do Just Dance and take turns holding the remotes!  That will be something to see.

She and a K teacher are now helping the clerk zip up into the Clifford costume...

Yeah, so what if Clifford is causing a traffic jam in the lobby?  The little ones are so happy.  And the older ones think it's funny that Clifford is waving a copy of the newest Captain Underpants book around and pointing to the book fair.

Well it's 10 now and it's nutty.  We've had two or three K classes that we've helped fill out Wish Lists for.  Those K kids are funny because they can't do anything on their own.  Heh heh.

One teacher sent some kids down to return all the books from her class, I guess forgetting that we have a book fair.  We sent them back.  They came back down and said they were to beg us to let them come in and check out at their normal time.  It's book fair!  Some other class has signed up for their time already!  The clerk went down to see her and now they are coming at their normal time if the teacher can keep her thumb on them while we deal with another class in the book fair and she checks them out herself.  Yeah, this is going to go smoothly.  Last half hour of the day too.  Stay tuned for that bit of fun.

I'll go ahead and post this now because I just got handed a silly job to do and it'll take some time. I'll update at lunch (if I get a lunch today).  Right now it's a brief quiet moment between K preview classes...

Two of My Favorite Things Together

The Daily Show and Patrick Stewart:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Feeling A Bit Lost

How long have I been doing this blog?  Over four years anyway.  It started as a productivity blog of all things.  Then a record of my journey from teacher into school librarian.  Then more of a book blog.

Right now it's...well I'm not sure what it is.  I don't mind posting the occasional book review but it's hardly a book blog.  There are so many better ones.

I don't mind posting things about school librarianship but I have surprisingly little to say about it.  I don't want to complain about the day to day stuff and I'm not much into writing about big picture stuff like "21st Century Skills" or "Transliteracy" or whatever.

An then there's the other outlets I've been trying out.

If you're a numbers person, I have 77 followers of this blog, but I don't think that's all the people that actually read it or even have it in their feed reader.  I could be wrong.  I'm not much into checking the analytic info.  On Twitter I have 68 followers but I don't think all of them are even real people.  I like Twitter, though.  I added it to the sidebar of this blog because Google took away their sharing button on their feed reader and I liked having that stuff show up in my sidebar.  So I use Twitter for that. It's also great because there's no decisions.  No circles or whatever.  You follow people, you don't follow people, you tweet, you retweet.  Whatever floats your canoe.

On Google Plus I'm apparently in 50 people's "circles."  Now Google Plus is growing on me, but I'm in the  process of figuring out how to put a demarcation between what I use G+ for and what I use Twitter for.  I'm thinking of sticking to my "reading and critical thinking" mission for Twitter and this blog, and having G+ be more personal interest oriented.

So basically, if I just want to share it and don't have much else to say about it, it'll be on Twitter and show up in the sidebar of this blog.  If it needs to be shown, like cool pictures, videos, etc, I'll probably post more of that kind of thing here on the blog. I'll also probably start posting more personal stories on here, like the previous posts.

Most of the blogs I still read regularly have some personality to them.  I know this little corner of the web will never be up there with wilwheaton.net or whatever or Blue Skunk or Ready When You Are with their hundreds of followers and I'm cool with that.  But I feel like I haven't been tending this garden and it's either time to get back to work or let it go.  I'm going to give it another six months and try posting more and loosening things up a bit and see how it goes.  If you like it, let me know.  If you don't, let me know that as well.

Like Quentin Crisp said: "I want to say the words you want to hear."