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.