Finally!

I am the WORST person in the world to keep a secret.  I try but it is torturous! So I FINALLY can share the secret I have been sitting on since late this summer!

I WON A PATTERSON GRANT FOR MY SCHOOL LIBRARY!

For those of you who don't know about this, author James Patterson has teamed up with Scholastic Books to promote school libraries. Here is a clip from the "official" press release wording:

There were 467 awards given and my school received one of them.

I've known for MONTHS but haven't been able to share until they issued the ok yesterday.  And, unfortunately, this is also part of the reason why I have not been blogging much.  I have been working on my grant.

My grant focuses on not only getting books into the hands of every child in my school but also getting them to interact, across grade levels, to discuss the book they read.  We are having a schoolwide literature circle in March.

So, my first task was to ask the kids what they liked to read and where their interest lie and what they wanted to read about.  I did this via a GoogleDocs survey for older kids and a good old fashioned interest survey for the younger ones.

Next, I had to gather the reading levels of every child in the school.  This was accomplished with some help from the STAT teacher because all of this is being done IN SECRET because the teachers don't know about the grant yet.

I have all the data so now I just need to work on inputting and compiling it, making the groups and getting the texts order.  February is going to be our reading month and March our celebration day.

I am tired already but also really excited.  This is going to be really awesome or go really badly.  But either way, every kid in my school gets a new book to keep and that is NEVER a bad thing.

Catching Up!

I know that I have been an absent blogger of late so I am going to take a few minutes to catch you up with the goings on in libraryland.

American Education Week wrapped up.  Lots of visitors to our school and to my library!  I had a large display in the hallway showcasing what the library has been doing and the resources available from BCPS.  I saw families taking a peek at my Book Character Pumpkin Display and reading the tweets and emails from authors.

I also launched two new ways for kids to interact with me and each other.  The first is a display called, "Where In the U.S.A is Mrs. Bixby?"  As you can see, I placed a large map in the hallway and students ask yes/no questions in order to try to "find" me.  When I am found, I make a short video for the morning announcements, using MovieMaker, that gives some history, main attractions and such for the state I was in.  I want to start mystery SKYPE but I first wanted to gauge the interest and questioning of my students.  So the interest is there and Mystery Skype will hopefully be happening in the Spring.

The second interaction was "Caption This" where a large drawing hangs in the library and students write a caption for it.  (I know - my title is beyond clever!) Take a peek at November's contest.

My students took the SpeakUp survey and we participated in Hour of Code.  I have a bunch of coding junkies now!  Just in time for indoor recess as the weather turns colder after the holidays.  The exciting thing is brothers and sisters who went home and talked to families and siblings so when I introduced the coding in class they were saying, "I know that.  My brother told me about this" or "My sister showed me this."  LOVE IT!  The students also went home and coded on their own and stop back by the library to share what them made after clicking on Khan Academy tutorials. 

We also received our racetrack from HotWheels - fun!  I am loving the conversations occurring during Makerspace time.  Watching them work together to process how to create a loop and have a car travel fully through it with no pushing on their part is priceless.  I need to videotape the awesome STEM occurring but I always forget because I am so wrapped up in it.

And...stay tuned because tomorrow I can FINALLY reveal my secret that I couldn't tell before!