Book Care

Book Care is one of the fist lessons school librarians teach at the start of every school year and depending how things go, they may teach it again after break. George Mason University has a very cute video to show proper book care at the university level. I was considering using this with my 3rd and 4th grade students and telling them that proper care of books is something that will follow them to college, so they should start practicing now. However as cute as this video is, it made me wonder if my students will even be using books by the time they get to college!

Awesome Day for Mo Willems...

The American Library Association announced their 2008 award winners today and as he says on his blog it was an Awesome Day for Mo Willems. He walked away with a Caldecott Honor for his book "Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity." Mo both illustrated and wrote the book and it is a favorite of my students along with the first “Knuffle Bunny” book. But the big news was his walking away with the Theodore Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) Award for the most distinguished book for beginning readers. He both wrote and illustrated the award winning book entitled “There’s a Bird on Your Head!” I cannot believe that I do not have this book in my library. I have been searching for a series for emergent readers and here is a Mo Willems book that is perfect for my students and I don’t have the book. It is part of the Elephant and Piggie series. I do have “Knuffle Bunny Too” but for some reason I did not hear about this series. Good thing there are awards like this to publicize good books. I am not sure about the Newbery Medal winners either, I have not heard of any of the books so I will have to check them out as well.
Tomorrow... MacWorld's Keynote! It's in the Air!

New Scholastic Venture with Rick Riordan

Wow…multi genre has nothing on Scholastic’s newest venture with author Rick Riordan. Riordan is the author of the Percy Jackson series, the normal New York kid who finds out that he is really a half-blood and his father is Poseidon. Percy goes on hero quests much like a modern day Hercules. But in this new venture with Scholastic, Riordan will pen a mystery book called, The Maze of Bones, that will have a collectable card component as well as a web component. There is even a contest with 39 clues. If teachers are not motivated to add technology to their curriculum, Scholastic will do it for them. This is really a multi media endeavor and if successful, it could lead to an entire new way to market books. My only problem is that Scholastic seems to be forgetting about the library. I hope they will reconsider and maybe offer some of the cards exclusively at libraries. I know they want to sell books but libraries buy books too!

Happy National Children's Book Week

I must admit I never thought about sharing poetry with my students for Children’s Book Week. Children’s Book Week is this week, November 12th to the 18th. But this is the last year we will be celebrating it in November, at the start of the school year. The Children’s Book Council has been celebrating Children’s Book Week since 1919. Since I became a librarian, I have looked forward to that special time in November when I can celebrate reading with my students with special book marks, a special display of their favorite reads, based on checkout figures from the previous year. However, I have noticed that American Education Week overshadows Children’s Book Week celebrations. Perhaps the Children’s Book Council noticed too because they are changing the celebration of Children’s Book Week to the month of May. So in 2008 we will celebrate Children’s Book Week from 12th-18th of May. That means this school year we will have two Children’s Book Week Celebrations and I could not be happier. We already have a great buy one, get one free book fair scheduled for that week in May and I hope the celebration will always happen during my May book fair. What a better way to celebrate Children’s Book Week than a book fair that gets summer reading materials into kids hands and doesn’t break parents banks? I am very excited that we will be celebrating Children’s Book Week in such a special way in 2008 and I hope it falls the same week as my book fair from now on… wouldn’t that be great?
Now, back to poetry. In the November 2007 Book Links Magazine, Sylvia Vardell has started a new column called Everyday Poetry. In the article Vardell says that Children’s Book Week is a good time to introduce children to poems about reading. Duh… why didn’t I think of that? Of course I always shared school poems but never thought of finding specific poems about reading. So, now I have a lot of work to do searching through my poetry books to find some about reading. This is actually a good thing since the 5th graders are starting looking at alliteration tomorrow. A few poems about reading may be just the ticket to enrich the lesson!
I like Vardell’s idea of using choral poetry reading too, the 5th grade teachers would like to get into podcasting. Choral reading of poetry may be just the ticket to getting the students a little bit of practice behind the microphone before they start their class projects.
I found this on teachertube.com:



We wrote Haiku for 3 weeks getting ready for our video-conference with author/poet Mary Quattlebaum, I think my students are ready to do something like the video above. Can't wait to try it! :-)