Tales from a Loud Librarian

Embed from Getty Images In my last post, I mentioned that the high school book group wanted to create poems in the style of Mad Libs as an activity during lunch in the library. Neither the students nor myself really have time to spend creating these pages. Looking online, I found a site that allows you to input words, and then a poem is generated for you with the words that you entered. We tried it during today's Bookmarked meeting. The kids liked the outcome, and it will be fun to do on the interactive whiteboard with a large group of students. This is the link from Language is Virus blog to generate your own Mad Libs style poems .  Below is the poem that the students made today:  blue rock's blue rock patiently i have never murder, floppily beyond any wall, your cake have their round: in your most evil eyebrows are things which annihilate me, or which i cannot imagine because they are too flabulously your crazy look gracefully will unfeast me ...

http://www.quote-coyote.com/quotes/authors/p/plutarch/ By the time April rolls around I am exhausted. We have just celebrated Teen Tech Week in the library, and I am gearing up for all the end of the year tasks that I do that don't happen to relate to the library. These tasks include preparing for the induction ceremony for the National Honor Society, completing duties as AP coordinator that take a huge amount of planning and logistics, assisting the val and sal with their speeches, and getting the script for graduation ready for the big day. The class of 2016 graduates on May 14th which is very early, and the last day for the rest of the students is May 25th.  If I want to celebrate National Poetry Month, we need to design and plan easy to do activities that the students can handle themselves or that take little work from me. One thing that I will do is send out a poem every day of the school week via email. I am not a big fan of email blasts, but I am careful to put Nati...

Student reading the poem that he found A couple of years ago, I came up with something for April that I called Hidden Poetry, but we didn't have time to do it last year and resurrected the activity for 2013. During National Poetry Month, I email a poem every day to all the students and staff of PFTSTA. Hidden Poetry allowed me to have a more interactive activity using poetry. First, I collect poems from students. I asked them to  send me a poem that they either wrote or a poem that speaks to them by any poet living or dead. I collate all the poems then print them on different colored paper. Students helped me cut out the poems, roll them and tie them with a ribbon. Then one day after school, the students hide the poems throughout the building. The next day, when a student finds a hidden poem, they bring it to the library. I ask them to read the poem to me and whoever is in the library, and then I reward them with a candy prize. All the poems are put onto a bulletin board as I...

It is April, so that means poetry month. I send out a poem daily in an email to all the students and teachers at PFTSTA. I also include a link to a poetry site on the homepage of the library OPAC. This year the link will be to Gregory K.'s GottaBook blog . He includes his own poems on the blog throughout the year, but during April, he asks 30 poets to contribute to his blog each day of the month. He calls it 30 Poets 30 Days . The poems are written by some of the biggest names in children's lit. Check it out. This year we are going to play the hidden poetry game again. The students will send me poems which I will print out. Then Bookmarked will help cut, roll and tie up all the poetry. One day after school some of the students will help to hide poems all over school. Over the next week, as students find the poems, they bring them to the library. I give them a treat for finding the poem. Each poem is added to the bulletin board outside of the library. We even add some poems...