A Good Book Brings Great Joy

It's December already! How did that happen? I recycled snowflakes made by the art classes three years ago and created a winter wonderland display for this month. I wrapped the loft bed with blue bulletin board paper. The snowman was made from styrofoam equipment packing-- this is his second year to be used.

The snowman is leaning up against an easel, and the knit cap covers the top part of the easel and keeps him upright. I cut out some black tree trunks and used shredded paper from our office to make the icy-looking leaves for the trees. 

I even piled some on the mattress grid above the trees as well as hung a few snowflakes from the grid to make it look like it was snowing.

I pulled Christmas books and scattered more snowflakes on the ground, and sat the snowman on top of a star-shaped crocheted tablecloth I found in someone's trash. I have used it in so many displays.

At the end of the loft bed I put the theme "A Good Book Brings Great Joy," and also added a table with a red Christmas tree skirt and more Christmas books after I took the picture. I also outlined the big picture windows with snowflakes in the front of the library. On the snowman, I used things I found in the office drawers: binder clips for the mouth, Percy Jackson pins for the eyes and buttons, and half of a plastic fork for the nose.

Here are some more quick displays:

Cost for these displays? Only a little time,
and with helpers, it didn't take long at all.
Have a wonderful holiday!



Be Thankful!

November was such a busy month with Book Fair and the Thanksgiving holiday, so I just modified the previous month's display by adding red, yellow, and orange leaves on the twisted vine-looking brown paper and strung "Be Thankful" across the front. This is the third year I've used the same leaves in a number of different ways. We cut the looped tape on the back and flattened it, so the tape doesn't tear the leaves. From then on we put the piece of looped tape on top of the tape from the first year so it's easy to remove. Sure saves time not to have to cut out leaves every year.

A colorful fall banner was hung from the end to create a different look.

Throw in a turkey and scatter a few fall leaves on the floor, and the new display is done.



Carve Out Time to Read!

The lack of time is our biggest challenge for most anything these days... including reading for enjoyment and knowledge. We're all given the same amount of time each day-- 24 hours, but it's up to each of us to determine how we can best use that time. How often do we flitter away valuable time due to lack of planning (What in the world am I supposed to be doing?), lack of organization (Now where did I put my planner?), lack of a clear vision or mission (Where am I going and what do I want to accomplish?), and the lack of discipline to get the job done (Where do I start?).

We make time for what's important to us, so one of my October displays addresses making time for reading in the midst of our busy schedules. I bought a pumpkin and carved a quick face on it with plans to find a battery operated light for it.

Ways for students to carve out time to read include: standing in line,after you finished your assignment in class, in between band or athletic events, waiting for the bus, while you're on the bus,  right when you get up, in the car, waiting for a ride, waiting for an appointment, and right before you go to bed.

Include books with pumpkins or about Halloween, red, yellow, and orange leaves, and a scarecrow watching over the display. I'm sorry to say that the carved pumpkin didn't last but a few days-- after the weekend it was black and fuzzy with mold coming out the openings and already sinking into a puddle on the table. Next time I'll just paint a face on the pumpkin so it will last longer.

I pulled more pumpkin and Halloween books to take its place.
RIP, punkin face.



Caught You Reading



Nothing original here. Just happy to work in a school district where so many of the students love to read. I've enjoyed walking around catching students reading after their school work is done. I'm making mini-posters and putting them all around school with the title Caught You Reading! and Teen Read Week October 17-23 as captions. The students love to have their photo taken, but if you put them up on a Web site, make sure the parents have given permission for their child to have their picture online.



Fall into Books

        I bought a beautiful throw a while back that had a wonderful saying, One hundred years from now... it won't matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove, but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child. -Forest E. Witcraft.
        And the woman and child are curled up in a big chair reading a book. Be still my heart. 

        The picture and colors look muted and old fashioned, so I went with that look, pulling in a quilted bear in wicker chair, a star-shaped crocheted table cover (both the bear and the crocheted piece were acquired from someone's trash down the road from my house), a decorative wrought iron mirror and candle holder, and baskets. I took apart a former tree made of twisted brown paper and wove the strands in and out of the loft bed top for no particular reason other than to soften the metal look. I used some leftover scavenged hardwood flooring planks and stood them up along the back like a wooden fence and held them in place with a folded cardboard packing strip. Hope I can find more of those planks-- I love that effect. 



       I pulled books that looked historical or old fashioned. If you look closely at the mirror, I faced two books backwards so you could see the faces on the covers in the reflection. Also caught a student's leg as they passed by outside.

My goal is to not repeat any displays for three years so students will see a different display every month. But I definitely hang onto everything and recycle and re-use them in different ways.

Happy Fall Reading!





Lights, Camera, Action!

Our principal came up with a wonderful theme for our campus inservice week before school, and I like to create the first display to coordinate with that, so my daughter helped me make a movie marquee:

Ninety-nine per cent of the time when someone has read a book and then watched the movie made from it, they tell me, "The book was better," so that's where the movie title came from. The grid and white background was very easy to make-- the original one is simply a white sheet of copy paper with two horizontal lines on it that I printed off 18 sheets to go all the way around three sides of the loft bed. I just mounted them side-by-side with about a quarter inch space between them, which creates the vertical line in the grid. The marquee grid is 11 inches-- the height of copy paper. I used the alphabet die cutters for the letters, so it was easy and quick to do.

I lined the loft bed frame with black posterboard paper; my daughter helped me cut out lots of circles for the  lights surrounding actual movie posters and marquee. The yellow ones were glued together in groups of threes and spaces between to give the appearance of blinking lights. I hung an actual projector screen inside the loft bed, and I wanted to show silhouettes of students reading books, but I ran out of time. The back of the loft bed has two other movie posters with the white lights surrounding them like the Twilight poster.

I pulled books that had been made into movies and encouraged the students to read them and see which they liked better: the movie or the book. The second shelf was also full, but a lot of them had been checked out by the time I took the picture. I'm sure there are more books in the shelves I can add to the cart. They definitely grabbed students' attention. 

Fantasy: Unbridled Fancy

The library window display for last month was fantasy, which one definition described it as unrestrained fancy. The Texan in me changed it to 'unbridled' fancy. I tried to unbridle my own mind and not think too hard about what I would include in the display other than using what materials I had on hand and trying to make it magical-looking or whatever strikes my fancy. It looks busy and cluttered-- not to be taken in and understood with a quick glance. There are layers and enigmas and oddities about it, much like fantasy stories.

So I used styrofoam packing materials, a lot of large rubber bands I've collected from our newspapers, window frames, vines created from twisted strips of bulletin board paper, a yellow brick road on the rubber mats from AV carts, and a lot of fantasy books to display including Frank L. Baum's Oz books (and there are more than just The Wizard of Oz), Kathryn Lasky's Guardian of Ga'hoole books, Tony Abbott's Secrets of Droon books, Erin Hunter's the Warriors books and other authors' books such as Tolkien, Potter, Barron, Lewis, and a number of others.

A book that is considered a fantasy has magical elements in it-- something that couldn't necessarily happen in real life-- talking animals, flying brooms, mythical creatures like dragons or ogres, inanimate objects coming to life, etc. Fantasy stories can take place in the distant past or future, or even a contemporary or present setting.

Often fantasy and science fiction are grouped together, but there are differences between them. Sci-fi usually takes place in the future and could potentially happen when technology catches up with the story. Often sci-fi writers are in the science or medical fields and can draw on their knowledge and backgrounds to come up with believable plots. With sci-fi and fantasy both, if the story has extraordinary technology and magical elements, it still has to ring true somehow or the reader won't commit to it.

"Scales" by Vanessa Roeder, Used with permission

www.nessadeeart.blogspot.com

Some of the most prolific readers in my middle school are fantasy readers. The library has a large collection of fantasy books, and many of them are in series, which students love because the stories and the characters they've become attached to don't end after one book.

The Quilt System

The February display tells the story of how people used quilts to send messages to the runaway slaves traversing the Underground Railroad. For the sign, I used MS Word and went to the Insert tab, Clip Art, and searched each letter individually to create a quilt square look for each letter.

I brought two colorful quilts from home to use as the background and draped on a chair, as well as some quilted placemats and a table runner. I brought out all of the cloth from the supply room and filled every basket I had on hand to make it look like a sewing room.

I pulled books about slavery and the Underground Railroad to display.

#12 Reflection and Evaluation

It's happened again. Technology continually grows and changes and updates, and I'm finding again with Web 2.0 that I have to keep growing and changing and updating with it. I see the contrast very distinctly between two libraries I'm currently working with: my church library and my school library.

The church library has almost 4,000, but only 800 books and videos are less than 20 years old, and most of the materials haven't been touched in years. The collection is circulated manually, and few patrons visit the library or even know what's in it. It has some wonderful resources buried amongst the old. We had a good meeting last night and came up with some short-term and long-term goals, and weeding will be the first major project. I'm excited about working with this small library and coming up with ways to resurrect it, using the librarian's words.

Contrasting that with my school library, I felt like we were really up with the times-- we are automated, our catalog is online where students can use our resources from home, we participate in the K-12 Database program, we have wireless Internet access where guests can bring their laptops and work online. I collaborate with seven other librarians in the district and we work together to improve our collections and services. But now that I've gone through A Dozen Ways to Two-Step Web 2.0 Training, I feel like there is just as big a difference between my library and what it can do with new technologically as there is between my library and the church library. We can be doing so much more, and I hope the twelve steps will continue to remain online so we can refer back to them when needed.

I was most familiar with having a blog because I created one with my own Web site [http://www.donnavancleve.com/ and http://www.blog.donnavancleve.com/] because of the books I've written, but I've only recently posting regularly on library-related purposes. I think I will continue the Shelf Mouse blog and switch the library posts to that blog. As for technologies that I was unfamiliar with--especially using them for library services, just about everything else in the training was new to me, so I definitely benefited from this course. Please keep them coming-- this is such a great idea!

Illustration by Vanessa Roeder, http://www.nessadeeart.blogspot.com/ and http://www.etsy.com/shop/nessadee Used with permission.

#11 The Wide World of Podcasting

I don't know why I hadn't thought about me actually doing a podcast-- I guess I thought it would be too complicated. I listened to some of Nancy Keane's book talks-- she's very expressive and has a wonderful reading voice, and I listened to some of the high school library podcasts-- the students did a great job, and the results looked simple enough to add a podcast. Nancy's podcast simply had the little progress line on a blank screen. The high school students had pictures posted with theirs, which gave me a face or picture to focus on while I'm listening.

I checked out the Library Live Web site and listened to Patrick Heath's and Kathryn Sturtz's podcasts, both of whom I knew some years back when the library I used to managed was a member of the Alamo Area Library System, so I had a mental picture of who was talking. They had some good information for supporting the library by determining its value to the community and tools provided by AALS to put a dollar figure or return on investment library services provide. Great when meeting with those funding sources.

Podcasts are another inexpensive, simple way to share what you know in the library world, which ultimately benefits everyone.

I listened to a song by Lucinda Williams on the Texas Music Matters. Good sound. For the Discovery Exercise I visited The Educational Podcast Directory and looked at the listings, and from there I hit a link to OPAL and took a look at the listings for Information Literacy, and listened to the blog on the Picturing America selections. It threw me for a moment because at first, it seems like it's live-- it even posted a few entries on a text live chat box. And I could hear everything as well as watch the slides of the pictures in the grant that the speaker is talking about and describing, and I had control over the slides. We did get the Picturing America grant so I am familiar with the art work she's referring to. She also shared some ideas on how to use and promote the art with the Picturing America grant, for example, having a mother-daughter tea party in reference to the silver tea service, sending students out with digital cameras to take pictures of architecture comparing and contrasting the architectural images in the collection, or having children make Native American crafts.

As for ways I gleaned that our library could use podcasts, I enjoyed listening to the students' book reviews and the librarian's book talks. I can see our students doing that, and I can imagine me doing a book talk on a podcast when my voice changes to something sultry and expressive instead of sounding like the country hick that I do. I wouldn't want to torture my listeners. : )  I would love for TLA to provide free podcasts of the speakers at the annual convention that we didn't get to hear. That would be great, especially in these days of limited budgets.

At home I'm able to have iTunes on my computer so I practiced subscribing to three different podcasts there.

Illustration by Vanessa Roeder @ http://www.nessadeeart.blogspot.com/ and http://www.etsy.com/shop/nessadee Used with permission.

Method #10 This Wiki World

So many good wikis, and so little time. That's the biggest drawback to me for using all these collaborative Web sites. It's nice to see that some are attempting to link the good ones. Once I start clicking, it's easy to get so far in it's like a virtual maze, but I can always add them to my Delicious account and organize them to be able to find them again.

I was taught to consider Wikipedia okay for casual information seeking, but it was a major no-no as a research source because it was a collaborative online encyclopedia. I asked my nephew Kyle in college last year what he thought of Wikipedia and did he use it for school work. He told me that he uses it as a source for sources. When he pulls up an article, he looks at the information and then scrolls down to see the Reference List or Bibliography for that listing and has found some good authoritative sources that way. I thought that was a great idea, so I've passed that tip on to teachers and students.

Never before in the history of mankind have we had to deal with the magnitude of information as we do now. We have to wade through so much, and often keep re-inventing the wheel again and again when we could save so much time collaborating with others and their successful in best library practices. Huge, huge help for us in the information industry. Wikis play a big role in that; just have to make the time to investigate and use them.