Tales from a Loud Librarian

It is always a great day when I have students visit with an author. I first met Ashley Elston at a state conference. Like me, she is from Louisiana. Her presentation to the roomful of librarians was hilarious, and I thought that my students would really enjoy talking to her. After the conference, we connected on Twitter, and I found out that she was happy to schedule a virtual visit with us. We agreed on a Monday in December during one of our regularly scheduled Bookmarked meetings. If I can schedule the author when the group is used to being in the library at that time, it is easier for the students to remember. Ashley came to writing after she had her children. She explained that being a wedding photographer did not mesh well with being a mom with young children. She really did not know what she was getting into but just began writing. She has four published books, and a new one to be published in the fall of 2019. For this visit, we concentrated on talking about her two...

Loaded down with swag from ALA I had been planning for the American Library Association's (ALA) annual conference in New Orleans for over a year. I was prepping the students in two of my book groups about what it would be like for them to spend a day with me at ALA, and if they wanted to attend, I made sure that they saved the date well in advance since many of them have camp, travel, or even work during the summer months. I was chair of the Young Adult Library Services Association's (YALSA) local area task force for this conference, so I had many duties throughout the week. I had not attended an ALA conference since Chicago in 2013, so I had booked myself solid from a pre-conference on Friday, June 22 until the afternoon of Monday, June 25. Then life happened. I had to put my 91 year old mother in the hospital on the Tuesday before the conference. We did not think she was seriously ill, but she had been feeling poorly for weeks. She knew about the conference, and ...

When I  discovered that Skype was not a tool that we could count on, I was worried that it might be the end of our virtual visits with authors. Skype itself was not the problem but the district filtering. Sometimes it worked, and it worked best if we were on the receiving end of the call. However, I could not count on it. We are now using FaceTime for our virtual author visits. This works great on our end with an iPad and is sufficient if the author also has an Apple product. When I was planning our visit with Irish author Patricia Forde , we were not sure if FaceTime would work. Since I discovered that it uses data not phone minutes; it did not cost anything to make the connection. I made a test call with Patricia a few weeks ahead of time, and I knew after talking to her that the kids were in for a treat.  We always start our visits the same way with the author telling us about the book and their writing process. Patricia explained that until she was ten she live...

Find links to many of the presentations here On Saturday, I attended a one day professional development sponsored by the Louisiana Association of School Librarians . I really enjoyed it and got some great ideas to use in my library. For my presentation at this event, I chose to talk about an activity that is relatively low tech. Technology is exciting. I love learning new ways to use it in the library, but I also don't want to concentrate on tech and not spread the word about the merits of reading and finding great books. I have three book groups that I run in my library. The middle school group meets monthly, but the other two groups for older students meet every week. It can be exhausting but also exhilarating. We have had some amazing discussions. I want to tell you now that you don't have to run a book group where every student in the group reads the same book. It can be very freeing once you decide to break the mold of book groups. Another big aspect of all of my...

Bookmarked Jr. Edition had a skype planned for November 2nd with author, Mark Alpert. Alpert requested that I do a test with him the day before to make sure everything was working. On the 1st, students had the day off, but teachers were at school. About 30 minutes before the appointed test skype, I booted up my laptop to open skype. There was an error message, and so I went to I. T. for a fix but found it closed. Since I couldn't use skype on the laptop, I grabbed my ipad and plugged it into the interactive white board to call Alpert. The audio was good on both sides as well as the video. We chatted a bit about the students and his books. I knew that the 8th graders were going to find his interests in science and the way he melds it into his science fiction fascinating. On the 2nd, I found out that I could use skype on the laptop, but I had to type in the password for the school system's filter to access it. I set up my laptop in the usual way ten minutes before ou...

Final meeting of BRiMS, that 's me in white Even though it was standardized testing week, I held our last regularly scheduled monthly  BRiMS  (Books Rule in Middle School) meeting on Wednesday during lunch. It seemed silly to cancel it since the students' lunch period was actually longer than usual last week. I liked the fact that I didn't have to cancel just because testing was being held in the morning--in some schools I would have to do so. We did have a lower turnout than usual, but I had been reminding kids about the meeting in emails, the daily school memo, and signage in the library. I do believe that the students need to learn how to take responsibility and keep track of meeting dates and times. Some forgot, some didn't read the book, and others just chose to go to the cafeteria for lunch. This year, I finally found a rhythm with the way that I organize what we read for each monthly meeting. For half the meetings, there was an assigned book and t...

PFTSTA Library All Readers Welcome In just two days, I will begin my 35th year of teaching and 10th year at Patrick Taylor . No longer am I nervous like I was so many years ago. Now I am brimming with excitement about all the special events that I have planned in the library this year and all the new books that may come our way as the year unfolds.  To get ready for the new year, I began cleaning up the library website. There are always edits and updates that I want to make. I am anticipating changing the look of the website, but I want to gather some new pictures before I do that. One of the sections of the website that I am most proud of is the one offering assistance to the students in preparation for college applications. You can find a link to that page here .  Finding authors to visit or skype with takes time because of all the scheduling logistics. The sixth and seventh graders will meet Jewell Parker Rhodes in October. This will be her third trip to our s...

Students pose with author, Andrea Cremer, during April 20th   skype visit The students in my two book groups had the opportunity to Skype with four different authors this past school year. I have been asked before if it is easy to find an author to skype. I always reply that it is, and that I have never paid any of the authors to talk with my students. I had met three of the authors who spoke with us this year face to face, but only one of them did I ask about the possibility of skyping at that time. I usually run all my author skypes the same way. I schedule the event for 30 minutes. I ask the author to talk about themselves and their book/s for the first 10 to 15 minutes, and then I allow the students to ask questions for the second half of the session. The students walk up to speak right into the microphone which allows the author to see who is speaking to them. This also makes it clear who is suppose to ask the next question. Very often the author is willing to talk l...

On Wednesday, the first meeting of the year for the middle school book group was scheduled in the new library. BRiMS is the short name for our Books Rule in Middle School. I set a maximum of 30 students in grades 6-8 for this club. Students signed up ahead of time and 22 showed up. We meet the last Wednesday of every month during middle school lunch. I let the students bring their lunch to the library, and I serve a snack as well. Generally, middle school students cannot bring food into the library-- so that was a nice perk for them. Even though the new library is big enough to house BRiMS and other students, the library was open only for the club members.  For the first meeting, we introduced ourselves and shared favorite books or favorite genres. The majority of the students are into sci fi and fantasy. I am excited about that because I am too, and there are so many great newly published books in those genres too. In the past, students all read the same book for ...

The recent edition of SLJTeen on December 19th marks six months of reviews by the teens in Bookmarked. This is the halfway mark for Bookmarked's stint as the resident teen book reviewers for the online newsletter. It has been an interesting six months. The students' book reviews are outstanding. They really have some intriguing insights about the books that they are reading. On the other hand, every two weeks arrives quickly, and it can be like pulling teeth for them to submit the reviews to me. I know that many of them are inundated with English work that entails a lot of reading. Also, our editor wants the books to be pre-pub by at least one month. It seems the publishers are sending the advanced copies much closer to the pub dates, and often by the time that the teens read the books, the publication date has passed. However, we have been able to overcome all these trials and tribulations. I want to share with you a link that will allow you to read every review that was pu...

On Thursday, October 4th, the middle school book group sat down to talk about the first book in Dashner's trilogy, The Maze Runner . The students loved the fact that such a small group showed up for this event and asked if next time the number of students could be capped at eight. It won't. We had one small issue with our discussion this month. One of the students had loved the first one so much that they plowed through the whole set before we sat down for our discussion. We kept having to ask them to quiet down every time they tried to speak with the rest of the group saying loudly, " STOP is it a SPOILER???? " The next book we will read is a single, so we won't be facing that issue again.  The book proved to be popular even among the students who are not fans of science fiction. Though one student said that she did not like any of the characters in the story. We tried to figure out what the Grievers really looked like by drawing our renditions of the ...

Enjoying lunch while chatting about the book On September 7th, the members of BRiMS were finally able to have their first book group meeting of the year. The meeting was originally scheduled for August 29th, the day that Hurricane Isaac blew through town. The school system had closed down the schools for seven days because of Isaac, and we kept changing the date of BRiMS every time the district announced a new return date for the students. It was crazy not knowing day to day when school would reopen. On September 6th, we did get back to work.  For this event we discussed the Richard Peck book, The Teacher's Funeral . I selected the book because I read it years ago and remembered how funny it was. The story is set in rural Indiana in 1904. This is like living on another planet to today's middle school students. Since I purchased the book for the library, no one had read it. Students at PFTSTA are not big readers of historical fiction. I knew that if I required them...