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.