Tales from a Loud Librarian

Laura Bush visited the New Orleans area today to give the last twelve grants for the Gulf Coast School Recovery Initiative . All 116 schools that received awards since 2006 were invited to participate in this event and representatives from 77 of those schools were there. I attended along with my principal, Jaime Zapico. It was held at Chalmette High School in St. Bernard Parish because that is where Mrs. Bush presented the first round of awards in 2006.  It was a beautiful affair. When we arrived, we got to visit with all the librarians and eat muffins and drink coffee. Since I have worked in both Orleans Parish and now Jefferson Parish schools, I knew a lot of the librarians attending the event. There was a wonderful student jazz band playing. After about an hour, we went into this amazing auditorium. A facility that we at Patrick Taylor only dream about. The chorus sang, and we heard more music from the band. Then a video was shown with librarians, students, and princip...

The above picture shows the table of contents of the January 18th edition of SLJ Teen Yesterday, I received an email from School Library Journal (SLJ) asking if Bookmarked , the high school library book group, would be interested in reviewing books for them. SLJ has several email/online newsletters. One of them is called SLJ Teen. In that bi-monthly newsletter, four to six teen reviews are posted in each issue.  The students in Bookmarked are already reviewing books for YALSA's Teen's Top Ten (TTT). I require each student to write at least one review every month to submit to the publishers. The student might nominate the book for TTT if they think that it is worthy. I think that the students could use the same review for TTT that they submit to the SLJ newsletter with some nominal additions. The teen reviews in SLJ Teen run about 200 words with half of the review describing plot and the other half describing why the reader liked or didn't like a particular book. I thi...