Tales from a Loud Librarian

RR 4 TTW 11 February 28 th You can play Research Riddles every day. Visit the library with the correct answer, and you will win a prize. You will use a pre-printed form to write down your answer/s and the source/s where you got the information. I don’t need a citation, but you need to state if you found your answer on Gale or Britannica or World Book. If you used a website, then you need to give me the name of the website or its URL. Google would NOT be the name of a website.   Questions of the day: The first Gulf War ended in February 1991. Iraq began the war by invading Kuwait. On what day did this happen?  Who was president of the US during this war?  Who was president of Iraq during this war?  Kuwait has more non-Kuwaitis living within the country than Kuwaitis. Name four countries that have many citizens living within the borders of  Kuwait.  Kuwaiti fighter pilots walk away from their Mirage F1 fighters after a raid on occupied Kuwait.

Sometimes I get a really good idea. I had planned a skype session for February 25th between Boomarked, the Patrick Taylor book group, and the STAC-Ms, the book group from Lake Norman Charter in Huntersville, NC. This date falls right in the middle of king cake season for Mardi Gras. King Cake parties are ubiquitous in our area this time of year. I decided that the two book groups should have a virtual king cake party. Mardi Gras colors are purple, green and gold, so king cakes are decorated with the colors of the season as you can see on the left. I ordered a cake from nearby bakery Haydel's . I started to panic on Thursday, thinking that the box would not arrive in North Carolina on time. Around 1:30 on Friday, I received an email informing me that UPS had just made the delivery. You can see the students above wearing the included beads and showing off the decorated box. Two members of Bookmarked want to share their favorite books. We were all amazed by the size of the libra

The Patrick Taylor library is all about the YALSA sponsored Teen Read Week (TRW) and Teen Tech Week  (TTW) every year. Usually, I like to hold the events on the weeks in October and March, respectively, that are sanctioned by YALSA. This year TTW falls during Mardi Gras. Now I have downloaded one of the new apps for Mardi Gras on my iPhone but that is about as techie as I am going to go that week. At Taylor, the students and I will celebrate TTW from February 28th - March 4th. We are going to kick it all off with a skype session for Bookmarked, the library book group. On Friday, February 25th we are going to have a virtual king cake party with the STAC_M's from Lake Norman Charter in North Carolina. I have ordered a king  cake to be shipped to Lake Norman, and I will go out and purchase a cake for Bookmarked on Friday morning. Then after school we will have a virtual king cake party. I can't wait. I will definitely post pics after the event. If you want to read about all t

A few months ago, my principal, Jaime Zapico, stopped by the library. I mentioned that it was a shame that the shelving I ordered when the library was established was only 42 inches high. That height gave me three shelves, though I was putting books on the wooden top because of lack of shelf space. I had realized in hindsight that I should have ordered taller shelves from the start. When I opened the PFTSTA Library in August of 2006, the district administration promised that the school would be moving into a brand new state of the art building in three years. This is now my fifth year at Taylor, and the new building is nowhere in sight. There are about 6,100 books in the collection. The current shelving could not hold all the books even with several hundred books checked out.  Jaime said that since construction on the new site has not begun, she imagines that Taylor will be in the current location for several years. She also told me to get a price for new shelving. I got a price, and

Here is a link to the announcement of my award on the Jefferson Parish Public School System site:  Open Here By the way, when I sent in the information about the award into the district, the text made sense. Something happened by the time it was posted on the JPPSS website.

 Double click on the picture below to enlarge the text to make it readable. 

In 2008, I was asked to write an article for YALS, the quarterly journal published by the Young Adult Library Services Association . I had won the Teen Read Week author visit contest in October of 2007, and YALSA wanted documentation of that event for YALS. Patrick Taylor was the lucky recipient of a visit by author, Tiffany Trent . She had written the spooky, Hallowmere series. Her visit was the first time an author had graced the halls of Taylor. She spent the day with us, and it was an awesome experience. This past fall, I was asked to summarize the article as YALSA was putting together a book about Teen Read Week and Teen Tech Week. Now I am published in a book. Here is the cover: Here is a blurb about the content from the book. As you can see, I have the honored position of being listed with Walter Dean Myers. If you double click the document below, you can enlarge it to a readable size. 

Look at what I got from my Patrick Taylor family! I took a photo so that I will always remember the beautiful flowers that arrived on Tuesday. That delivery was a really nice surprise.

Today a 7th grade English class skyped with  Lisa Brown , one of the authors of  Picture the Dead .  The book is a ghost story set in Boston during the American Civil War.  She may have been 2000 miles away in San Francisco, but it really felt like Lisa was visiting us right in the school's library.  The students' teacher, Mrs. North, read the book out loud to them (most of it). Two lucky members of the class are going to win their own copy of the book. There will be two contests. Students can either write a ghost story, and the winner will get a book and get to send a copy of their story to Lisa Brown. Or the students can draw or design a picture illustrating one of the ghost visitations from the book.  We set up our minuscule sized library auditorium style. The laptop with the camera was hooked up to the whiteboard, so the students could easily see Lisa.  In the above picture, you can see that Lisa donned a bonnet to give us a little taste of the 19th century period.

This morning, I received a very exciting letter in the mail.  I have been selected as the:  Louisiana School Library Media Specialist for 2011 ! Here is a copy so that you can read all about it.

I really like to post here at least once a week. I have been so busy that I have had no time to write anything. Last week and this week, I have done some test prep on using information resources because the students will be taking interval tests. After the session with the 6th graders, I realize that we have some work to do. The high schoolers seem to be right on track. Bookmarked has been sending me reviews which I must send on to the publishers. Haven't had a chance to do that either. I am requiring book group members to write a minimum of one review every month. The books arrive almost daily. Some of the titles have so much interest others nobody wants to read. In three weeks, we are going to try again and have a skype session with the kids at Lake Norman Charter in NC. Next week, I have a skype session planned between 7th graders and Adele Griffin who wrote, Picture the Dead . I just got a copy of the book today, so I am excited to take it home and read. Hopefully, nex