Tales from a Loud Librarian

Add caption One of the parents at my school encouraged me to write a Donor's Choose grant at the beginning of the school year. She just knew that the Chevron Fuel Your School program would fund the grant idea that I had for robots in the library. I was thrilled about that because I hate having to beg friends, family, and parents for the money to fund projects on Donor's Choose. I think that Donor's Choose is a great way to obtain new materials, but I am not always comfortable soliciting donations. For some reason Chevron passed over my grant and another at my school. I still wanted the Ozobot robots for the library , so I rewrote the grant with less items costing less money in hopes that it would be funded quickly. It was. We have had the Ozobots only about a week. They are delightful little "creatures" and keep the students busy before school and during lunch in the library. The library has had three Sphero robots in the makerspace for ...

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...

Earlier this week, I found out that my project for buying books for my middle school book group was funded on Donors' Choose . I am thrilled, and I know that the kids will be also. Because of the kind donations, the students will be reading the following books during one of our monthly meetings:                             

Find project here I have been running a middle school book group since February 2011. I have always had one or two copies of the book for the month in the library, and then I expected the students to either buy the book or find it in the public library. The books that we selected were always available in the public library. This process never worked well because the students didn't seek out the book outside of school, so when we met as a group most of the students had not read the selected book. So we only chose a book every other month, and on the opposite months, we all read from the same genre. That was okay because that meant every member read a book, but it made a quality discussion difficult. I tried a Donor's Choose project before asking for devices where I could download the books for the students to read. That project never got funded, but I am trying again now. This time, I am asking for the physical books. Please consider helping our project by making a small d...