What Have You Been Up To?

(Me and Marc Brown, creator/author of the Arthur series) 

You know what they say, time flies when you are having fun. Time also flies when you have a baby, move and start a new job. It almost makes you forget that you used to do things like write blog posts. Luckily, a snow day arrived giving me a chance to make soup, bake cookies, catch up on some TV AND sit down to write this!

What I love most about this blog is that it is evolves based on where my career has taken me. From Queens Library to the Central Synagogue and now to HANC Plainview, I have gone from the world of programs and major reader’s advisory to mastering the art of preschool readiness and engaging story times to reinventing the library space and curriculum in an elementary school.

When I first started considering the library curriculum and what one teaches elementary school kids I thought to myself “this is the most boring thing ever”. Seriously, Dictionaries? Encyclopedias? Atlases? All I could think about was the embarrassment my kids would have every week when their classes showed up and I had to give over information on how to use these giant books that are pretty much obsolete thanks to Google and Google Maps. So, in true Francie fashion, I have been trying to figure out ways of how to make Library cool again. Thanks to Pinterest (how did ANYONE survive without Pinterest? What did people do? Get creative themselves? Experiment??) I have truly gotten such inspiration and confidently show up to work with ideas (I think?) that are making my students understand how the library is structured and why reading is fun and books are awesome. I guess the next stage of this blog will be sharing some of my classroom ideas and of course I will continue to showcase the books I am adding to the school’s collection.

The first topic we tackled was the standard first lesson of what is in a library and how we treat books. The younger classes got a coloring page with all those rules they couldn’t read but hopefully understood based on the pictures. We then jumped into parts of a book. I was extremely pleased to see that everyone K-3 knew this and felt like they all learned something new when we talked about title pages. Since you are sleeping reading this, the game we played on this topic was surprisingly fun. Thanks to Pinterest, I made a dice and each part of the book was on one of the six sides. There were a bunch of books on the table and each child took a turn rolling the dice and had to choose a book and show us whatever they rolled (ex: author on the dice, read out loud the name of the author on a book on the table). As far as library lessons go, I felt pretty good leaving at the end of the day after this one.

My next major topic (which we are currently doing) is Fiction vs. Non-Fiction. I had a hard time figuring out how to excite 3^rd graders with this but I am pretty confident my “Fishin For Fiction” game will be a total hit (the Kindergarten loved it!) I made laminated fish labeled Fiction and Non-Fiction and put them in a fishbowl. With leveled appropriate books on the table (mix of fic and non-fic), children took turns “fishing” and whatever they fished they had to pick up a book from the table that matched. (Ex: fished a “Fiction” fish, pointed to an Elephant and Piggie book.) I love putting books in front of the kids because I believe it helps guide them when choosing books to take home. In the past, children took whatever they wanted, even if they couldn’t understand what they reading BUT could read the words (EX: a book about Matter for a Kindergartner who read the title correctly) and I am trying to change this to get the right books in the hands of the right readers.

We’ve been incorporating call numbers in the Fiction-Non-Fiction lesson to gear up for some Dewey Decimal instruction. Gear up from some relays and scavenger hunts in our little library! I hope you continue to read my posts and hear about my journey as a school librarian and that this gives you some ideas on how to spice up some of the less glamorous (but equally important) life skills you learn from the Library!