Tales from a Loud Librarian

In 2014 was the first time that I set up a display for Blind Date with a Book  (BDWB). The kids loved it. When I set up the display the following year, I had students add some information about each book on the wrapping so that students could make an informed choice. This really improved the whole blind date experience.  What will this new read be? Then I said the heck with this, it is so difficult to wrap the books and keep wrapping additional books after the books get checked out that I stopped putting up the display. This year I have seen so many cute displays on social media, and Pinterest is filled with BDWB display ideas . I decided it was time to bring it back to my library. She is a happy camper! I needed to figure out a simpler way to package the books, list some qualities of the book, and be ready to add new books to the display as they get checked out. I made a nice design on Canva to print out, and you can find it here and feel free to copy an...

Add caption One of the parents at my school encouraged me to write a Donor's Choose grant at the beginning of the school year. She just knew that the Chevron Fuel Your School program would fund the grant idea that I had for robots in the library. I was thrilled about that because I hate having to beg friends, family, and parents for the money to fund projects on Donor's Choose. I think that Donor's Choose is a great way to obtain new materials, but I am not always comfortable soliciting donations. For some reason Chevron passed over my grant and another at my school. I still wanted the Ozobot robots for the library , so I rewrote the grant with less items costing less money in hopes that it would be funded quickly. It was. We have had the Ozobots only about a week. They are delightful little "creatures" and keep the students busy before school and during lunch in the library. The library has had three Sphero robots in the makerspace for ...

At the beginning of the school year, I planned a skype session for each of the three book groups that I run. On Monday, the high school book group had their chance to talk to an author. Marieke Nijkamp is Dutch and her first published book This is Where it Ends is all American. It is written from the point of view of several characters who experience 54 minutes of school when a student pulls a gun out during a school assembly and proceeds to kill and wound many.  This skype session like all the ones that I do began with Nijkamp talking for 15 minutes about how she came to write this book (she was visiting the US during the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting), all the research that she did (she talked to American friends who experienced a shooting at their school), and how much she has grown to love the characters in the book (she knew ahead of time which characters would live and which would die). Then I left 15 minutes open to questions from the students. I don't ask...