Dot Day (Week) Part Two

We've continued our Dot Day celebration throughout the week!

Tuesday, Ms. Thompson's first graders connected with my friends Sarah Staudt & Ben Feight in Mason City, Iowa. Together we read the book The Day the Crayons Quit with our new friends. It was fun to get to meet other students across the state and share a story together!

Photo credit: Ben Feight

This is a picture from Mrs. Staudt's room as she's reading aloud to us. We are there in her computer screen! Check out Mr. Feight's blog to see what he had to say about the event!

Later, Mrs. Velvick's 4th graders met with Mrs. Staudt's class to create collaborative dots using Google Draw. We created 7 dots ahead of time, and students worked in groups of 5-6 to create dots between Cedar Rapids and Mason City! It was really cool to watch the students try to work collaboratively and see them start writing messages back and forth to each other finding out each other's names, what sports teams they liked, and other fun facts. The dots ended up a little messy, because we didn't give a lot of guidelines--we just wanted to see what the students could do!

Hopefully we will have the chance to do this again later in the year to learn collaboratively with friends in other places! 

Wednesday, Mrs. Collett's class Skyped with Ms. Nels' 3rd graders in southern Florida! We had a great time asking and answering questions about our cities. The weather in Florida is much different than Iowa, we found out! These students have been working on making Dot Day trading cards in Art class with Mr. Plagman. We will be sending these to our new friends in Florida, and they will be sending theirs to us! We shared a few of those during our Skype.

Ms. Schulte's kindergartener's got to Skype with an AK class in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We found out that most of them like the Green Bay Packers, and that several of us do too! Ms. Schulte's class shared the bookmarks that they'd been working on during art class. We will be sending those to our friends and we'll have a bookmark exchange!

Maxwell sharing his bookmark & getting thumbs up from our Wisconsin friends!

Mrs. Roelfs' second graders got to have fun with Mrs. Staudt, too! We made one big dot all together using Google Draw. Students in Cedar Rapids and Mason City took turns coming up and making their mark inside of our dot. 

Here's how our dot ended up!

We've had a fun week of connections, meeting new friends, and learning about life in different parts of the country! I can't wait until Dot Day 2015!

Dot Day (Day One!)

Today we started our Dot Day celebration! Actually, we started last week by reading the book The Dot by Peter H. Reynolds. The Dot is a book about creativity, trying new things, and making your mark!

Last week, we colored dots and played with the ColAR app on the iPads to make our dots turn into fun spheres and other things.

I loved this dot made by a 3rd grader. Her class read the story on 9/11 and she made her dot to help everyone remember. So sweet, and such a showing of empathy. 

Today we had our first Skype session with Mrs. Kauten's group of kindergarteners and Mrs. Powell's group of first graders. We talked with Jennie Ford's kindergarteners in Pocahontas, Iowa. It was a little crazy with so many kids, but we managed! We showed off some dots that the kids made during art class this week.

Photo credit Kendra Hanzlik (@khanzlik)

Next, we met with Cristol Kapp's 4th graders from Chatanooga, TN. It was fun to talk about our time zone differences and to hear their Southern accents. We talked a little bit about our cities, but our time got cut short. We will have to try to connect again. Our students had a lot of questions about their lives in Tennessee.

Next, Mrs. Ward's 2nd grade classes met with Esther Uribe's class from Austin, Texas. We took turns reading from Ish by Peter H. Reynolds and talked about it inbetween. This was such a great learning experience for our students, and they really loved it! How fun to share books across states!

Photo credit Kendra Hanzlik (@khanzlik)

Next, Mrs. Bird's 4th grade class met with Ms. Bery's class in Massachusetts. Again, we talked a bit about our towns and schools. We found out their town is so small they don't have stop lights! The kids loved hearing about the differences and similarities between our two schools. We also shared some bookmarks that we made that we are going to send to them, and they'll send us some back. how fun!

Next Mrs. Hilgenkamp's kindergarten students met with Carol Scrimgeour's class in Vermont. The kindergarteners loved sharing a little about where we live. We compared maps with the students out in Vermont and talked about how long it would take to get there. We also shared some of our dot clothing we were wearing and listened to the Dot Song. 

And lastly, Mrs. Mehman's 3rd graders Skyped with Mr. Traxson's class in Inman, Kansas. We made a collaborative dot, where our students would make a mark on our dot, then one of their students would copy it onto their own dot. Then they would make a mark, and we'd copy it. It was so fun to see the creativity and fun we had!

What a busy, whirlwind of a day! We still have 5 Skype meetings with students around the country later this week--stay tuned!

Genre-Based Shelving

Here is the email I sent to our staff regarding genre-based shelving. I truly think this is going to be so much easier for staff and students, even though it will take some time to get used to and to work out any errors I made in cataloging. Thankfully it's a very flexible way of shelving!

At the bottom you'll see links to more specifics about our shelving.

                                                                                                                                                      

For the new library at Prairie Hill we have decided to shelve books according to genre in all sections. This is a trend that many school libraries are going to, including our libraries at Creek, Point and Prairie High. In these libraries, and many others around the country, genre based shelving is primarily done in the fiction section. However, since Hill is starting from scratch, we will be completely genre based in fiction, non-fiction, and picture books. 

The purpose of genre based shelving is to help students and staff be able to find books easier. We won’t have to spend a lot of time looking up books on the computer, because everything will be organized in a very logical way. If you are looking for a mystery, you’ll simply go to the mystery section. If you are looking for a book about immigration, there’s a section for that. I’ve tried my best to create non-fiction sections based on our curriculum, but obviously there are others, too. It will take a little time to get used to, but I truly believe it will be so much easier for everyone to locate resources, and even just to browse. 

I’ve started creating signage for the fiction & picture book sections. I’ve attached the link to the Google Presentation in case you want to look at it. I’m open to suggestions about wording or anything else you notice. There are 10 fiction sections (I’m going to move classics into their true genres) and 18 picture book sections, plus a “general” picture book sections for the few books that were hard to place. The “favorites” picture book section I will probably end up moving to their true genre as well. There were some things that I didn’t catch while create the categories, and as you can imagine, it was a lot of work to pre-sort the books into their categories and make those final decisions. Luckily, everything is flexible!

There are around 140 non-fiction sections. The signage for these will be much more simple, as they are more self-explanatory. They will be smaller and contain the name of the section & hopefully a picture or symbol that explains the category. I’ve attached the list that has all of the genres/categories for your information. However, it will be much easier for you just to stop in and see the library when we get going!

Also, the data is currently importing into the library catalog. It will take another hour or so to finish, but you are able to look up books right away! 

Here is the Google Doc that has all of our genres/categories listed.

Here is the Presentation with the genre signage. 

Here is the link to our Destiny catalog. 

There are Books!

Last Friday, Mackin delivered all of our books for our startup collection! I'm so proud of the high quality books that we purchased, and how well they will fit student interests & our curricular areas. I truly believe we purchased the best collection possible.

Our average age for fiction is 5 years, non-fiction is 4 years, and picture books are 8 years. We have approximately 14.5 books per student, which is a great start, but still allows us for growth. I'm sure I will find that certain areas won't be as heavily used, or that we ordered too many or not enough of a topic, but that is all part of the learning process! 

A picture book shelf. The inmost rows of picture books and non-fiction are on wheels, which makes them so easy to move around and will be great for when we need to have a large number of students in the library for author visits or book fairs!

Most of the shelves also have these beautiful endcap displays. I can't wait to dream up fun ways to display books in them!

Here's a picture of the historical picture book shelf to show the spine labels.

This is a picture of part of our guided reading collection. The non-fiction guided reading titles we bought to support the science/social studies curriculum are going to blow away our students and staff. They are amazing titles.

Here's part of the fiction.

The remainder of the fiction.

The non-fiction food/cooking shelf! 

We have this little window bench in the back corner, and this week will have our front reading corner finished, which will have benches like this. It is going to be awesome.

Looking from the back of a non-fiction row toward the front.

This is taken from the west wall, looking east.

This is from the front of the room, looking toward the circulation desk and the media services office.

And this is from the east wall, looking west. I don't think it could be any more beautiful!

Floor Plan

Just because it's fun to look at, here's a sketch of what the library setup will look like!

The circulation desk is at the front, it's just hard to see in this picture. There will also be a few differences, as a few of the shelves are mobile, so they won't necessarily be where they are in this visual. And the empty corner on the left side will be some soft seating for students to lounge/read.

The shelving on the left side will be the picture books, and the right side will be non-fiction. The taller shelves towards the top of this picture is where the fiction will go. All three sections will be shelved based on genre, not the DDS. More to come about that when I have time to sit down and post!

I can't wait to finally see the library, to meet the kids, and to sniff the new books! Don't you just love the smell of new books?!

Welcome!

Welcome to Prairie Hill Library!

The start of the school year is almost upon us, and our building is very close to being finished. We are very excited as a staff, and have had a few work days to get the year underway.

I have been busy working all summer processing guided reading, title 1, and leveled classroom readers. It has been a long process, and not always fun at times. Luckily, I've had some great helpers!

I can't wait to see how the next month unfolds and to finally get to see the physical library space. I know that it is going to be an amazing place and that I have wonderful people to work with!

These are pictures of processing the guided reading titles. This included cataloging them into the Destiny system, then barcoding, level labeling, taping, and stamping them. I'm estimating we will have around 12,000 guided reading titles. I am most excited about the non-fiction titles, and how they will perfectly support our science and social studies curriculum.

The last half of April and first half of May were filled with ordering and planning. Our library will be organized by genre, not the Dewey Decimal System. I will be posting about that at a later time, because it was a huge undertaking. 

Every time I thought I'd made progress with the current stack of boxes, more would show up. I'm thankful for whoever checked in the box in the bottom picture and left the smiley face. That made me laugh!