Tech Tools Tuesday

Great Blogs with Great Ideas

This morning I was overwhelmed with thankfulness for all of the intelligent and capable bloggers out there who are willing to share their library ideas with me.  Some days I come to work all excited about what I am going to teach, and then some days, it seems as though I have been teaching the same thing for about four hundred years.  Now I can avoid that feeling by simply visiting some of my favorite blogs where I can find any number of inspiring ideas for teaching about books.  You can find most of my favorites listed on the side bar of my blog, but today I found a couple of great ideas that I will be using in November.

100 Scope Notes by Travis Jonker

November is Picture Book Month!  What an excellent reason to share wonderful literature with every grade level.  He includes a video on his blog to show to students about picture books.

Watch. Connect. Read. by Mr. Schu

Mr. Schu creates a monthly activity calendar for librarians through the magazine Library Sparks, but he makes it available to everyone.  He just released his November calendar with ideas for books to read, holidays to celebrate, and websites to visit.

Librarian Arika by Arika Dickens

The OTTER Award, or Junior Sasquatch, is a wonderful new idea, and I hope it catches on.  Arika shares on her blog the criteria for this award that we are hoping to bring to a library near you!

Tech Tools Tuesday

Are you using Twitter? 

Some of you are, some are not, but you should.  It all started for me last spring at the nErDCamp Bellingham when I decided to go to a session called "Twitter - It's not stalking when it's an author" or something like that.  We learned about the invaluable resource of Twitter when it comes to contacting a real live author when you live in the farthest Northwest corner of the Continental United States, and close to nobody comes here except once a year in February (for the WWU Children's Literature Conference.)

Here are some of my cool experiences brought to me by Twitter so far:

1. I found out about a webcast by Jarrett Krosoczka @StudioJJK where my students asked him questions and he told us about his drawing process.  Then we won a signed set of the drawings he made while we were watching him!



2. I found out that John Schu @MrSchuReads is a wealth of knowledge about children's books, #kidlit, and I feel cool every time I read a book that he recommended.

Watch. Connect. Read.

Exploring Children's Literature through Book Trailers

3. I starting following Donalyn Miller @donalynbooks also known as The Book Whisperer.  Through her blog and posts, I found out about The Bookaday Challenge, #bookaday, and took on the challenge.  This past summer I read a book a day, posting to #bookday for each book and tagging authors in my posts.  I connected with so many authors who were willing to take a few seconds out of their day to interact with me.  It was mind-blowing!  (I am not quite sure why it was so mind-blowing, doesn't every author enjoy knowing that someone out there read his or her book and it then made an impact on that person? They are just real people, I keep telling myself.)  As an aside, I was fortunate enough to meet Donalyn Miller this weekend at the #WLMA15 Conference, and she is just as wonderful and inspiring in person as she is in her books and blog.



4. I am collaborating with a librarian from a different part of the state on a new state-wide award.  We have used Twitter so far to interact and throw out ideas. We have both piloted the idea in our districts. Hopefully, next year we will be introducing a new award for early chapter books for the state of Washington.

If you would like to try out Twitter, read this blog called "Embrace the Power of Twitter" on Cool Tools for 21st Century Learners.  It will get you up to date on all the lingo and requirements to get started (which really isn't much at all!)

Good luck!

Happy Socktober!

SOCKTOPUS says...Get involved!

It is that time of year again! Time to get out there and get some socks donated for the homeless in your community.  If you are wondering what this is all about, you take a look at the Official Socktober website to find out, or you can watch this great video by one of my favorite YouTube stars, Kid President.

I am fortunate being the librarian, since I can share this video and the purpose of Socktober with the whole school.  Hopefully, we will collect a whole lot of socks for our community homeless shelters.  We even have a district competition between a few of our schools to see who can bring in the most socks!  

This year I have added Matt De La Pena's book, Last Stop on Market Street, to my presentation for 2nd and 3rd grades, since it is the perfect book about being a part of your community by giving back. As a bonus, it is on the nomination list for the Washington State Children's Choice Picture Book Award. 

Happy Socktober!!!