So I’ve survived my first official week as a middle school librarian!

This was exam week at my school, so there wasn’t too much activity in the library. I’m anxious to start working with and getting to know the students, but it really was nice for me to have a quiet week to finish my “nesting.” I also had some time to really explore some of the features of Destiny that I haven’t used before. I discovered Destiny Quest, which has an awesome interface and allows students to not only search the library collection, but to read and write reviews, recommend books to friends, and put books on hold. I am really looking forward to sharing this resource with my students and teaching them to use all of the cool features. Definitely more to come on this!

I thought that the library needed some fun puzzles that the students would enjoy. My mom gave me these two for Christmas:

At first the kids just kind of stood there and looked at them. Which of course cracked me up. I guess they thought I’d put puzzles out on the circulation desk just to tease them? They obviously don’t know me yet! So after I talked a few of them into giving it a shot, they became quite popular and I even had a few come in during lunch to give these puzzles a try.

I also got a Diary of a Wimpy Kid jigsaw puzzle. I found this cool felt mat that came with a tube and straps so I can roll it up without messing up the puzzle if I need to. After the reluctance to try the maze puzzles, I had my library workers get this one started. A few kids that came in during lunch also tried this one out. I think this is going to be a hit!

I’ve been toying with the idea of shelving fiction by genre once we get into the new library. Regardless of if I do that or not, I knew I wanted to at least tag the books by genre so the students could browse the shelves for genres more easily. I ordered color-tinted label protectors and have started tagging the books:

Orange – Series

Light Blue – Realistic Fiction

Dark Blue – Sports

Pink – Romance

Yellow – Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Green – Mystery/Suspense/Horror

I’m also thinking I need to add a color for historical fiction, and maybe one for classics. I think the series tags are going to be particularly useful for students.

This is also giving me a chance to get to know the collection and do some weeding. The librarian before me did a lot of weeding, but there’s still so much that I just don’t see as anything the students would want to check out. Plus there are some titles that we have with serious multiple copy overkill. I knew my elementary school collection so well, there were few times that I even needed to use the catalog. Although this collection is much bigger, I know I won’t be happy until I’m extremely familiar with it. Which is why I’ve decided to take on this project right away.

We’re off on Monday, but we’ll kick of the new semester on Tuesday with LYRCA (our state book award) voting! It’s an event I love, giving students the opportunity to vote on real voting machines. We have about 140 students participating. So I’m looking forward to another great week!

This was an exhausting, emotionally draining week for me. The retiring middle school librarian had a substitute this week in the library, but she did spend a bit of time early in the week cleaning out and packing up. My replacement at the elementary library started on Monday. I spent the week in limbo — mornings at the middle school and afternoons at the elementary school. I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to do this. It allowed me the chance to tie up my loose ends at the elementary school and get myself situated at the middle school.

Being the techno-geek that I am, I made some changes to scheduling and morning routines at the middle school by infusing technology. I went crazy with the Google forms and I’m loving it! Mornings at the CMS library are very busy. Thankfully, there are several awesome teachers who have library duty to help out. Not only do students flock in to study, use the computers or printer/copier, return/check-out books, etc. but the library also takes care of selling temporary and replacement ID cards. These forms are now being used for students to sign in:

The ID Business form has been especially successful since the ID station is in the computer lab and the spreadsheet can be pulled up at that station so the names pop up as they are entered.

I went round and round trying to decide how I wanted to do scheduling. I needed to keep up with scheduling for the main area of the library, library lab, and 4 mobile labs available for check-out. Nan from Rhinelander High School shared her format for digital scheduling, and I loved it! You can check out here site here. So I took her idea and ran with it:

You can go here to see my live form with the Google calendars below. I think once the teachers get used to filling out the form, they’ll really like the ability to schedule whenever they want from where ever they are. I’m going to be looking to drum up some business and do some collaborative projects. Exciting times ahead!

As tough as this week was, I really felt the love at both schools. CMS is very happy to have me back and they have made me feel so welcome. TES let me know how much I’ll be missed, which really made me feel good and made it hard to leave at the same time.

So here’s to the next phase of my library career! I can’t wait to see what it holds.

BEWARE: This post is basically my excitement bubbling over…side-bar notes in (parenthesis) and exclamations !!! are abundant.

It’s been a busy week decorating and snazzing things up at my new (to me, it’s really old and smelly) middle school library! When this opportunity first came about, I wasn’t planning on making any changes since we’re (supposed to be) moving into a brand new school (HOLLA!) for January 2012. The building that we are currently in is ancient, falling apart, and pretty much full of asbestos and mold. (In fact, it is the middle school that I attended in 6-8 grades. I was even a student library worker there, so this is really like coming home.) Since the school is so icky and old, plans for a new school have been in the works for a while and it’s FINALLY coming to fruition.

So despite the fact that we’ll be moving to a new school in the very near future, I couldn’t keep myself from doing a little sprucing up. I mean, I’m going to be spending the majority of my waking hours there. Most of the things can come with us to the new school. And I went with trendy — zebra print, bright blue, neon green, and pink. So do ya wanna see it?? Here are some pictures:

The wood on the front of the circulation desk had seen better days (and those days were long ago), so we covered it with this cute green fabric. Spray adhesive is AWESOME! We also added some little circle mirrors from Hobby Lobby. And of course, I had to put up my favorite Go!Animate characters who will be appearing in lots of videos…I’ll be able to change their word bubbles frequently.

There were some pictures and columns already in the library. We spray painted the frames and columns. The zebra in the picture is fabric and the letters I cut out from scrapbook paper. I think this came out SO CUTE! 🙂

We stenciled some great quotes about books and reading:

“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” -Richard Steele

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” -Margaret Fuller

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” -Earnest Hemingway

“A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life.” -H.W. Beecher

“Books can be dangerous. Some should be labeled: ‘This could change your life.'” -Helen Exley

Quite a few hours went into the stenciling, and I REALLY appreciate all of the help from my mom and friend BJ. They are the best volunteers I have (not just to this, but for everything) and I am so thankful for everything they do.

And those curtains are really shower curtains that I found on sale at Big Lots — SCORE!

There was a cheesy poster (sorry, Marie) to mark the Student Publication Center, so we stenciled there, too.

I’m really proud of myself for putting together the great zebra chair my mom got for me! And the lamp…isn’t it groovy?

I’m so excited and ready to get back to school and see the reactions from students and teachers. Hope the reaction is a good one! I know that they will miss the retiring librarian. She’s one of my mentors and a wonderfully sweet, patient, and compassionate woman. They’ll be getting something a little bit different with me (HA!) but I can’t wait to see what the next few weeks have in store.

If you are impressed with my (and mom’s) mad decorating skillz, leave me some love (as in a comment)!

While completing my undergrad program, I hated writing reflections. We were forced to “reflect” on everything, meaning we wrote a page or two of complete and total bull in order to appease our professors. Upon graduation, I looked forward to no longer having to “reflect.” My crew even put a snide reflection comment on our graduation t-shirts. Yet here I am, well over a year into writing this blog, and I am reflecting on my practices at least once a week. I do this because my internalized reflections are so constant that I need to put them into writing on a regular basis.

Lots of my favorite bloggers are writing posts in which they reflect on the past year and look forward to 2011. At this point, that would be very difficult for me to do because there is so much impending change with the start of the new year. So please excuse these scattered and possibly random ramblings.

First of all, I really wish I was one of those rock star bloggers who craft these really moving, thought provoking posts that really push your thinking. But I don’t, and honestly think that this point I can’t. I’m still in the infant stage of my career — I’m 25 years old and in my third year of librarianship, for crying out loud! I’m still a kid, geez. And I’m completely proud of what I accomplished in my 2.5 years at my fabulous elementary school. I may not have done things that genuinely flow with or push the limits of the changing shape of our profession, but I can honestly say that I built a pretty strong program that served my kiddos and fulfilled their reading needs. It’s something to be proud of, and I am.

The time to reflect on and appreciate my time spent with 2nd and 3rd graders was very brief. I’ve been in a frenzy of brainstorming and planning for my new middle school library position. I am very hopeful that this position will give me the opportunity to push my limits and become the change agent that I dream of being. But for now, I have to start with baby steps to make changes to the program so I can make it my own. Looking forward, I’m so unbelievably excited about the opportunities and challenges that await.

Even though this end of the year reflection is different, scattered, short, and a probably incomplete, it is an accurate representation of the place where I am at this moment in time. And isn’t that basically what a reflection should be?

So I’ve basically been incoherent lately with SO MUCH going on inside my head with this upcoming move.

I really enjoyed myself these last two weeks as an elementary school librarian, having fun with my students and coworkers. As I said in my last post, there are so many things I’ll miss.

But moving forward, there is so much that I’m SO EXCITED about! I haven’t done much reading lately because my brain won’t slow down long enough for that. I’ve been working on my new library wiki and making plans. I know I have big shoes to fill — the retiring librarian is amazing and has done so much for CMS. I also know that I’ll be quite different. Where Marie is soft-spoken, composed, and has it together, I’m loud, spastic, and out there. But I hope to bring my strengths to help the CMS library continue to improve and serve students and teachers well. Here are the things I plan to throw myself into immediately:

Share my techno-love! From what I hear, many teachers are looking for new ways to infuse technology to enrich learning experiences for students. I’ll be using a wikispaces page as the library’s website and home that exploring it will show teachers and students that using tech tools is a passion of mine so they will approach me for ideas.

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Move to a digital calendar. The library operates on a completely flex schedule, which I am so totally PSYCHED about. I’ll also be in charge of scheduling checkout for the mobile labs. This is currently done on a paper calendar that gives me anxiety and causes me to hyperventilate. I haven’t decided yet how exactly I’ll do scheduling, but I know it will be different. I’m toying with using the Novell calendar that goes with our email (not a big fan, but it’s what we have), using a Google Calendar, or putting a spreadsheet on the shared drive or Google Docs. If you or anyone you know has experience with scheduling like this, feedback would be majorly appreciated.

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Categorize books by genre. I’ll be moving into a brand spankin’ new library within the next year or two, and I’m seriously toying with the idea of arranging the fiction section by genre. My first step for this is going to be to label the book using these tined label protectors from Demco:

I’ll definitely be sharing more about this in the future. I’m still hashing out the specifics, but anticipate this to be a very good thing.

I also want to move to self checkout, but that’s not something I’m going to try to tackle right away. And I know that once I get in there I’ll start making even more plans and gain a more realistic perspective on how to implement them. These are exciting days ahead, folks!

So I haven’t blogged about my move yet. It’s been very emotional for me, even though it’s been in the works for many months. I just wasn’t ready to put it out there onto the Internet (and into reality for me, maybe?) until now. Plus I wanted it to be approved by the School Board and all that formal stuff, which went down a few hours ago.

So on January 10th (my official date) I will no longer be an elementary school librarian. I will be moving to the library at Central Middle. Middle school has always been where my heart is. It’s where I originally taught, and their librarian is now retiring. I was asked to come back and it wasn’t an easy decision for me. I know that in the long run, it’s what I want to do. But it sure is hard to leave the blood, sweat, and tears I’ve put into my library for the last few years. It’s also hard to leave the faculty and the wonderful relationships I have formed. As a librarian, it’s not easy to build working relationships and street cred from teachers, and this year I was finally feeling like I’d gotten to that place. I’m so proud of the elementary school library that has been created (not from scratch, but from a big fat mess) and the program that really TRULY fosters a love of reading. It’s going to be hard for me to let go. But I am so grateful that I’ll be walking into a much more organized library and don’t have to start at the bottom again.

So over the next few weeks and months I’ll be sharing lots of things that excite me about my new opportunities. I’m looking forward to my move to middle school, but there are lots of things that I’ll miss about my little ones. I want to take some time to reflect on the things I love about working in an elementary library. Here are a few of the things I’ll miss most:

1. Precious little smiling faces. Smiles still full of baby teeth. Smiles full of gaps from lost teeth. Smiles that are growing into the ones they will have as adults.

2. Reading beautiful picture books while I have their rapt attention. Especially when we get to that point in a story where they all gasp because they are so completely engrossed in what’s happening.

3. Their innocence. There are always a few who are losing theirs too young, which is heartbreaking. But for the most part they are still so innocent. And that innocence allows them to be so imaginative and throw themselves into whatever they’re doing.

4. Holidays. Every holiday is such an event for them. They require decorations, celebration, holiday themed stories, arts and craft projects, singing, and snacks. This includes birthdays, which are IMMENSELY important when you’ve only had 8 so far in your life.

5. Reading is cool. Books are fun and something to get excited about. And when they take the leap from picture books to chapter books — I love that.

I’m going to miss the teachers and administrators desperately. There are so many great things about the school that can’t even be described unless you’ve worked there. I will always be grateful for the support that I’ve had, particularly from my administration, that has helped shape my professional path. The few years that I’ve been privileged to work with 2nd and 3rd graders alongside so many amazing educators have given me experience and perspective that I will always carry with me. The transition will be bittersweet for me. I am sad to leave such a great crew, but I so look forward to the experiences to come. And I’m going to end here before I start bawling.