Bulletin Boards

What can I say about bulletin boards except I have a love/hate relationship with them. First of all I have too many of them in the library and would much rather have shelving higher than a three feet, but I make the best of it. Or at least I'm trying. I also have a bulletin board in the hallway in another part of the school. Which I actually LOVE having. Its in a main hallway, across from the restrooms, so there is lots of traffic. I've noticed that if I include book covers I have in the library, guess what books get checked out?

I get a lot of ideas from Pinterest and have a board just for Library Displays. If your interested, you can see where I got my ideas from. October, November (which BTW I can't find an original pin and it drives me nuts), February (pictures are not currently showing on the original blog), and April.

Welcome Back using Carson-Dellosa kit.

October using Carson-Dellosa kit and an assortment of other fall leaves.

I made the basket by weaving together heavy brown paper.

November using the same tree base, a monkey set and some palm leaves.
I had made the tiger and giraffe years ago, they are out of proportion, but what the heck.

February using a variety of hearts from the party store.
We pulled every pink and red covered book we could find.
"Roses are red, Books are red too. If you like great books, then these books are for you!"

Book Fair Fiesta and another trip to the party store.

April - back to the tree along with the kits woodland animals.

My Pinterest board is full of new ideas for this year. I hope to share them more frequently. Be on the lookout. If you adapt any of these ideas, please let me know. Post a photo or a link in the comments. I'd love to see what you did.

Goodreads

Book reviews. Do you write them? Do you read them? After receiving my LMS I was very into book reviews. Since I read so much I wanted to write a review of every book I read. I started Too Many Books and I kept it up for three years, but it was difficult. I blamed it on the blog mechanics, the fact I was paying for the blog to keep out ads, and I decided to started another, what I deemed easier, blog. Same name, Too Many Books, but moved over to Blogger. It only took me about a year to realize that I'm not a very good book reviewer. I either want to ramble on on, or I'm too much to the point. And why bother? There are some amazing bloggers out there already doing great reviews. I'll read what they wrote. I really only need to remember what I thought of the book, short, precise, ideas. More up my aisle. Hello Goodreads.

Pat's bookshelf: read

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Display Windows

Display Windows: I have two, and these are not all of my monthly displays, just the ones I liked the best. Plus I do repeat some of the more popular ones every year. We are located at the beginning of the specials wing and on the way to lunch, so I have found the more "stuff" there is to draw their eyes towards the books, the more action the books get. These are no particular order.

The large letters are painted paper mache from JoAnne's.

The kids loved the hats and boots. I also had a coat on display elsewhere in the LMC.

I found the chandelier at a summer sidewalk sale at Cracker Barrel of all places.

The kids loved the fake marshmallows! I used modeling foam and charcoal pencil.

The snowballs are styrofoam.

The tombstones were hard to find because they needed to be small enough to fit into the windows.

The Halloween windows are consistent favorites. I'm always on the lookout at the dollar store, garage sales, the party store and the clearance aisle of Target and Walgreen for display items. I refuse to pay a lot of money for anything and probably spend more time than I should on the displays. Which is why I tend to leave them up a bit longer than I'd like sometimes. Some displays have been huge hits, others flops. But the students always like them and always comment on them so I must be doing something right.

Pinterest

All I can say...Love it! Honestly, the ideas are endless, and they so thoughtfully created an organizational system a librarian could love. It's basically cataloging all your thoughts in picture format, with an opportunity for added notes. What is NOT to love?

I've been actively pinning for over 2 years and have nearly 2,700 pins on 79 boards. That said, I am selective about what I'll pin and I work hard to find all original informational sources. For example I won't pin any decorating ideas for stairs, and while I've seen many great ideas, I wouldn't use any of them.

Now that I've benefited from the exchange of ideas, I decided that I should put some of my photos out there to share. And I have a lot so I decided to split them into separate posts. Yikes!

Paper mache letters & Mod Podge. Don't throw away those old book award posters.

Blog Revival or Snowballs in Fall

Not in the spiritual sense, but wow, has it been almost a year since my last blog post?  Am I really THAT bad of a blogger?  No more my friends.  I am now committed to give back some of the ideas that I take away from the many blogs I visit each week.

link

Starting with one of my favorite 5th grade review lessons :   Snowballs in Fall

Let me start by noting this is not an original idea, I read about the review concept on a blog somewhere and then just adapted the lesson.

Prep: I take my Genre Word Wall words and their definitions and put them on 8.5x5.5" paper in a large enough font to be easily read.  Crumble them into snowballs and place into a container to make it easy to carry.  Collect my whistle.  Done.

Rules: You may not hit anyone above the shoulders, although the snowball is only paper, it can still hurt if caught in the eye. (I've never had this happen yet) You may not hoard snowballs, only one snowball at a time.  When the whistle blows, stop.

Review: Each student should have one-two snowballs depending on class size and the number of snowballs created. They should carefully open them to avoid ripping the paper. The now locate their partner.  Once all partners have been located, students read off their genre and definition to the class before returning to their seat.

Depending on how quickly they accomplish this task I have a second set of snowballs ready to go with my regular Library Word Wall words (title, author, spine, character, etc).  The kids love the lesson and it's a great kick-off to the school year.

Does this accomplish a Common Core task, no.  But without the information gained from observing my students remember, problem solve, and interact with other I can't move onto the greater lessons that do.

A Tweet, a Hashtag, and a Follow - OH MY! How to Build Your PLN and Stay Connected in Under 140 Characters

 Whew!  At times that 140 character limit is, well, limiting.  But that's the point.  For the past couple of years I've been trying to connect with my local teacher librarians on Twitter to no avail.  So I decided to be brave, act like I knew what I was talking about (well I must since I'm actually doing it, right), and present a session at the 2011 ISLMA conference.  Thus my posting title, which happens to also be my session title.  I've given quite a bit of thought to how to present all this information since so much of it is on-line or linked.  It basically came down to either a wiki or resurrecting my long forgotten blog.  Guess which won?

That said, notice the new page, Twitter, on which you will find the actual presentation itself.  I hope you find it useful.