Book fair

Needless to say, this was a busy week. With lessons for media, IT, and the book fair, I kept very busy. I spent several hours working at our Scholastic book fair. I say working, but it isn't work when you love it like I did. I enjoyed helping children pick out books and seeing many of my students excited to choose books to read for pleasure.

Shiloh Point: 3 hours

Media time for 1st graders

This last week I spent time teaching the 1st grade media lessons. I taught the first lesson of my reading enrichment unit on bats. I read the book Stellaluna and then we talked about sequencing (a first grade standard). After our discussion, the students drew pictures of an event from the book and told me if it was from the beginning, middle, or end of the story. I will be turning the pictures into a photostory that the children can listen to on their teacher's webpage and library webpage. This will be a reference for research later in the unit plan.

Shiloh Point: 11 hours

Work in IT

This last week I spent several hours working with our IT teaching 1st graders how to logon and use the laptops. I found this time valuable. The children come from different levels of understanding and previous computer use. Each step of using the computer must be broken down into small steps and modeled for the students. I wanted to spend some time observing how to teach computer skills to students and found this time useful.

Shiloh Point: 5 hours

Grade Level meeting

This afternoon I attended a kindergarten grade level meeting. At first I was a little disappointed that we were just covering paperwork. But then we got to the substance of the meeting. The teachers were discussing the upcoming standards. The webinar that I attended last night became very useful. The discussion on preparing materials and resources to help teachers was immediately relevant. The teachers discussed what was upcoming and shared resources. I will be preparing resources for their next meeting that will focus on their standards they have selected. The webinar and grade level meeting helped cement into my mind the importance of being a team member and a teacher's resource.

Time spent: 1 hr

Webinar

Last night I participated in a webinar through the Teacher Librarian virtual cafe. I heard from three Media Specialists (Keisa Williams, Shannon Miller, and Gweneth Jones) on how they meet the needs of teachers and become indispensable in their schools. They had several good ideas that I would like to start immediately upon becoming a MS. Some of their ideas included preparing slides and information for open house, solving technology problems, and finding sources print and non-print for teachers. I have seen that the stakeholders of the Media Center must see the benefit for themselves. Media specialists need to look for opportunities to highlight their strengths and usefulness.

Time spent: 1 hr.

Yesterday I processed a book order that came from Mackin. It seemed almost too easy to input into the system so I tried it with a couple different scenarios. The first was inputting the information with the disk provided with the book order. Our school library uses Destiny, so the information was just imported from the disk to Destiny with a touch of a few buttons.

Then I tried to process the items if a disk was not provided. Destiny was a very useful tool. I just did a search for the book by title and the book was found with the MARC records included. Finally, I searched the Library of Congress and found the MARC information.

The books came with the barcode and spine tags already on them. However, I did practice printing a few.

Time spent: 1hr.